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Published byPrinceton Architectural Press East Seventh StreetNew York, New York

For a free catalog of books, call ....Visit our website at www.papress.com.

Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Bree Anne Apperley, Sara Bader, Dorothy Ball,Nicola Bednarek, Janet Behning, Becca Casbon, Carina Cha, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu,Carolyn Deuschle, Russell Fernandez, Pete Fitzpatrick, Clare Jacobson, Aileen Kwun,Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee, Laurie Manfra, John Myers, Katharine Myers,Dan Simon, Andrew Stepanian, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Deb Wood ofPrinceton Architectural PressKevin C. Lippert, publisher

Managing Editor: Jennifer TompsonProject Editor: Wendy FullerDesigner: Jan Haux

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataRosenberg, Daniel, Cartographies of time / Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton.st ed.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references.ISBN ---- (alk. paper). Chronology, Historical. . Chronology, HistoricalMaps. . Histor yPhilosophy. I. Grafton, Anthony. II. itle.D..R .dc

Princeton Architectural Press

All rights reservedPrinted and bound in China First edition

Cover image: Historical and Biographical Chart of the United States, DavidRamsay, . Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner withoutwritten permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews .

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright.Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.


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Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton

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Contents

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My deep thanks go to Sina Najafi, Sasha Archibald, BrianMcMullen, and al Schori, my collaborators on the imeline ofimelinesthat appeared in issue 13 of Cabinet: A Quarterly of Artand Culture. Tis book would surely never have come to be wereit not for their genius. Te same goes for Susan Harding, MarcoHarding, Joseph Masco, and the entire Histories of the Futuregroup.I first began to collect timelines while participating in a seminarthat Susan organized at the University of California HumanitiesResearch Institute. In the years since, I have been collecting debts

to the Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture atRutgers University, the Huntington Library, the Clark Library atthe University of CaliforniaLos Angeles, the Clark Art Institute,MASS MoCA, Argos, the Slought Foundation, the Museo Rufinoamayo, the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at IndianaUniversity, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Sciencein Berlin, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and theOregon Humanities Center. My thanks to the wonderful librar-ians who have assisted me at these institutions, especially in theKnight Library at the University of Oregon, the Library Companyof Philadelphia, and the Department of Rare Books and SpecialCollections at Princeton University, where the greatest part of the

research for this project was conducted, especially Stephen Ferguson,Donald Skemer, AnnaLee Pauls, Andrea Immel, John Blazejewski,and Charlene Peacock.

I wish also to thank Alletta Brenner, Teresa Champ, MikeWitmore, Daniel Selcer, Jonathan Sheehan, Arielle Saiber, SophiaRosenfeld, Miryam Sas, Pamela Jackson, Ken Wissoker, Amy

Greenstadt, Steven Stern, Jamer Hunt, Justin Novak, FrdriquePressmann, Elena Filipovic, Pip Day, Nato Tompson, DrorWahrman, Michel Chaouli, Martin Jay, Randolph Starn, EviatarZerubavel, John Gillis, Harold Mah, Joel Smith, Sheila Schwartz,Neil de Grasse yson, Maya Lin, Christoph Fink, Katie Lewis,Jacqui Glanz, Anne Glanz, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Jim Shaw,Steven Shankman, Barbara Altmann, Julia Heydon, GeorgiaBarnhill, Michael Paulus, Roy Goodman, Vicki Cutting, JamesFox, Lesli Larson, and Eliz Breakstone, as well as the past and pre-

sent EMods of the University of Oregon, including Andrew Schulz,David Castillo, Fabienne Moore, Diane Dugaw, Amanda Powell,James Harper, Lisa Freinkel, Leah Middlebrook, and NathalieHester. Mark Johnson was an insightful editor for the original pro-posal for this project. Jeff Ravel did a brilliant job editing my articleJoseph Priestley and the Graphic Invention of Modern ime forStudies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Tanks to my colleaguesin the Robert D. Clark Honors College, and especially to JosephFracchia, David Frank, and Richard Kraus, and in the Departmentof History at the University of Oregon including Jeff Ostler, MartinSummers, John McCole, George Sheridan, Randall McGowen, andDavid Luebke, and to Carla Hesse, who has guided me with care

for many years. Tanks also to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundationand to the University of Oregon, who together provided me theopportunity to go to Princeton University to collaborate on thisbook; to the Princeton University Humanities Council and CarolRigolot, Cass Garner, and Lin Deitta; to Barbara Leavey and theCenter for Collaborative History and the Department of History;

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and to Anthony Grafton, whose collaboration, vision, and advicehave opened new vistas for me.

My personal thanks to Harry Rosenberg, Barbara Filner, JoshuaRosenberg, Gwendolen Gross, Jacob Rosenberg, Carina Rosenberg,Jack Paris, Judy Cheng Paris, Su-Lin Nichols, Bill Nichols, CharlieNichols, Will Nichols, and above all to my partner, Mai-Lin Cheng,whose contributions to this project are without measure. My effortsare dedicated to the memory of Amy Jean Kuntz.Daniel Rosenberg

Many benefactors, friends, and colleagues have made my work onCartographies of imenot only possible but immensely pleasurable.Heartfelt thanks to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundationabove allto Harriet Zuckerman, Joseph Meisel, and William Bowenfortheir imaginative and generous financial support. Funds from theMellon Foundation and the Max Planck Institute for the Historyof Science in Berlin made possible the workshop on chronologyin Berlin at which this enterprise was conceived. Lorraine Daston,who cosponsored and hosted the workshop, has my warmestthanks, for her hospitality, for many other kindnesses over the years,

and for her erudite and penetrating advice. Further funding fromthe Mellon Foundation made it possible for Daniel Rosenberg tospend the academic year 20067 at Princeton, and for me to devotemuch of that year to working with him. Carol Rigolot, Cass Garner,and Lin Deitta in the Council of the Humanities and BarbaraLeavey and Judy Hanson in the Department of History made the

complex practical arrangements for our collaboration. Tciency, speed in action, and warm hospitality are beyondTe extraordinary staff of Princetons Department of Rarand Special CollectionsBen Primer, Stephen FergusoNeedham, Donald Skemer, and AnnaLee Paulshave asremarkable resources in Princeton for the study of chronolointelligence, resourcefulness and generosity made the bulresearch possible, and they have done an extraordinary jobducing many of the photographs for this book. Our friend

Darnton, formerly director of Princetons Center for the SBooks and Media, allowed us to present an early version of oings at a special meeting of the Centers works-in-progress Tose in attendance responded with warm enthusiasm andcriticism to what turned out to be the very first draft of ththe chronologists whom we study in this book would have rthat occasion in capital letters and red ink.

Tanks, finally, to scholars around the world who interest in the creativity and quirks of early modern erand whose advice, criticism, and exemplary scholarship hacrucial: Daniel Rosenberg,primus inter pares, for the curiossion, and store of learning that have made our collaborati

a joy; and Ann Blair, Jed Buchwald, Max Engammare, MoFeingold, Peter Miller, Philipp Nothaft, Nick PopperRowland, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Jeff SchwegmanSiraisi, Benjamin Steiner, Walter Stephens, Noel Swerdlow,late Joseph Levine.Anthony Grafton

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What does history look like? How do you draw time?

While historical texts have long been subject to critical anal-ysis, the formal and historical problems posed by graphicrepresentations of time have largely been ignored. Tis isno small matter: graphic representation is among our mostimportant tools for organizing information.Yet, little hasbeen written about historical charts and diagrams. And,

for all of the excellent work that has been recently pub-lished on the history and theory of cartography, we havefew examples of critical work in the area of what EviatarZerubavel has called time maps.Tis book is an attempt toaddress that gap.

In many ways, this work is a reflection on linesstraight and curved, branching and crossing, simple andembellished, technical and artisticthe basic componentsof historical diagrams. Our claim is that the line is a muchmore complex and colorful figure than is usually thought.

Historians will probably appreciate this aspect of the bookfairly easily. We all use simple line diagrams in our class-roomswhat we usually call timelinesto great effect.

We get them, our students get them, they translate won-derfully from weighty analytic history books to thrillingnarrative ones.

But simple and intuitive as they seem, these timelinesare not without a history themselves. Tey were not alwayshere to help us in our lectures, and they have not alwaystaken the forms that we unthinkingly give them. Tey aresuch a familiar part of our mental furniture that it is some-times hard to remember that we ever acquired them in thefirst place. But we did. And the story of how is worth tell-ing, because it helps us understand where our contempo-

rary conceptions of history come from, how they work, and,especially, how they rely on visual forms. It is also worthtelling because its a good story, full of twists and turns andunexpected characters, soon to be revealed.

Another reason for the gap in our historical and theo-retical understanding of timelines is the relatively low sta-tus that we generally grant to chronology as a kind of study.

Tough we use chronologies all the time, and could not dowithout them, we typically see them as only distillationsof complex historical narratives and ideas. Chronologies

work, andas far as most people are concernedthatsenough. But, as we will show in this book, it wasnt alwaysso: from the classical period to the Renaissance in Europe,chronology was among the most revered of scholarly pur-suits. Indeed, in some respects, it held a status higher thanthe study of history itself. While history dealt in stories,

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chronology dealt in facts. Moreover, the facts of chronologyhad significant implications outside of the academic studyof history. For Christians, getting chronology right was thekey to many practical matters such as knowing when tocelebrate Easter and weighty ones such as knowing whenthe Apocalypse was nigh.

Yet, as historian Hayden White has argued, despite theclear cultural importance of chronology, it has been difficult

to induce Western historians to think of it as anything morethan a rudimentary form of historiography. Te traditionalaccount of the birth of modern historical thinking tracesa path from the enumerated (but not yet narrated) medi-eval date lists called annals, through the narrated (but not

yet narrative) accounts called chronicles, to fully narrativeforms of historiography that emerge with modernity itself.According to this account, for something to qualify as his-toriography, it is not enough that it deal in real, rather thanmerely imaginary, events; and it is not enough that [it repre-

sent] events in its order of discourse according to the chron-ological framework in which they originally occurred. Teevents must be. . . revealed as possessing a structure, an orderof meaning, that they do not possess as mere sequence.Long thought of as mere sequences, in our histories ofhistory, chronologies have usually been left out.

But, as White argues, there is nothing mereproblem of assembling coherent chronologies no

visual analogues. Like their modern successors, tradchronographic forms performed both rote historicaand heavy conceptual lifting. Tey assembled, selectorganized diverse bits of historical information in thof dated lists. And the chronologies of a given periotell us as much about its visions of past and future a

historical narratives.White gives the example of the famous m

manuscript chronology called theAnnals of St. Gallrecords events in the Frankish kingdoms during the ninth, and tenth centuries in chronological order witin a left hand column and events on the right. [figs. 2a modern eye, annals such as these appear strange anbeginning and ending seemingly without reason, mup categories helter-skelter like the famous Chinesclopedia conjured by Jorge Luis Borges. Here, for ex

is a section covering the years to .

. Hard winter. Duke Gottf ried died.

. Hard year and deficient in crops.

.

. Flood everywhere.

[1 ]_______________________________

calendar, Saul Steinberg,Untitled, __________

Ink, collage, and colored pencil on paper,

x inches, Beinecke Rare Book andManuscript Library, Yale University Te

Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights

Society (ARS), New York

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.

. Pippin, mayor of the palace died.

.

.

.

. Charles devastated the Saxon with great destruction.

.

. Charles fought against the Saxons.

. Teudo drove the Saracens out of Aquitaine.. Great crops.

.

.

. Saracens came for the first time.

.

. Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died.

. Charles fought against the Saracens at Poitiers on Saturday.

.

.

From a historiographical point of view, the text seemsto be missing a great deal. Tough it meets a very mini-mal definition of narrative (it is referential, it representstemporality), it possesses few or none of the characteristicsthat we normally expect in a story, much less a history. Te

Annals make no distinction between natural occurrencesand human acts; they give no indication of cause and effect;no entry is given more priority than another. Below thelevel of years, references to time are strangely gnomic: inthe year , for example, the text indicates that CharlesMartel fought the Saracens on Saturday, but it does notspecify whichSaturday. Above the level of the year, there isno distinction among periods, and lists begin and end as

nameless chroniclers pick up and put down their pens. Butthis should not be taken to suggest that the St. Gall manu-scripts are without meaningful structure. o the contrary,

White argues, in their very form, these annals breathe withthe life of the Middle Ages. Te Annals of St. Gall, Whiteargues, vividly figure a world of scarcity and violence, a

world in which forces of disorder occupy the forefrontof attention, in which things happen topeople rather thanone in which people dothings.As such, they represent aform closely calibrated to both the interests and the visionof their users.

Parallel observations have been made by scholars ofnon-Western historiography such as the great Indian his-torian Romila Tapar. Tapar has long emphasized thatgenealogy and chronicle are not primitive efforts to write

what would become history in other hands, but powerful,


[23 ]_______________________________

Annals of St. Gall, Monastery ofSt. Gall, Switzerland, mid-eleventhcentury


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graphically dense ways of describing and interpreting thepast.And in recent years, historians of premodern Europelike Roberto Bizzocchi, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, andRosamond McKitterick have begun to pay due attentionto the graphically sophisticated ways in which genealogi-cal formsespecially the treehave developed and beenused in the historiography of both the premodern and themodern West.

Addressing the problem of chronology, and especiallythe problem of visual chronology, means going back to theline, to understand its ubiquity, flexibility, and force. In rep-resentations of time, lines appear virtually everywhere, intexts and images and devices. Sometimes, as in the time-lines found in history textbooks, the presence of the linecouldnt be more obvious. But in other instances, it is moresubtle. On an analog clock, for example, the hour and min-ute hands trace lines through space; though these lines arecircular, they are lines nonetheless. As the linguist George

Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson have argued, thelinear metaphor is even at work in the digital clock, thoughno line is actually visible. In this device, the line is presentas an intermediate metaphor: to understand the meaningof the numbers, the viewer translates them into imaginedpoints on a line.

Our idea of time is so wrapped up with the metathe line that taking them apart seems virtually impoAccording to the literary critic W. J. . Mitchell, Tis that spatial form is the perceptual basis of our notime, that we literally cannot tell time without the tion of space.Mitchell argues that all temporal lais contaminated by spatial figures. We speak of loshort times, of intervals (literally, spaces betwee

before and afterall implicit metaphors which dupon a mental picture of time as a linear continuContinuity and sequentiality are spatial images bathe schema of the unbroken line or surface; the expof simultaneity or discontinuity is simply based in dkinds of spatial images f rom those involved in contsequential experiences of time.And it may well Mitchell is right. But recognizing this can only be aning. In the field of temporal representation, the lineeverywhere because it is so flexible and its configu

so diverse.Te histories of literature and art furnish andant store of examples of the complex interdependtemporal concepts and figures. Andas in the casedigital clockin many instances metaphors that apdraw their force from a different source in fact con



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implicit linear figure. Tis is the case even in the famouspassage from Shakespeare where Macbeth compares timeto an experience of language fragmented into meaning-less bits:

o-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

o the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsTe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Lifes but a walking shadow, a poor player,

Tat struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

old by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

As the critic J. Hillis Miller writes, For Macbeth, timeis a sequence of days that stretches out in a line leading to

its cessation at death, figured as a series of syllables makinga sentence or strings of sentences, for example a speech byan actor on the stage. ime, for Macbeth, exists only as itis recorded. It is a mad nonsensical tale, an incoherent nar-rative. Such a narrative is made of pieces that do not hangtogether, a series of syllables that do not cohere into words

and sentences.Yet even for Macbeth, though the past andthe future have lost all meaning, the passage of time is orderlyand linear, and each meaningless human life covers a pre-cisely measurable segment of it, an hour upon the stage.

In the graphic arts, the same holds true: from themost ancient images to the most modern, the line servesas a central figure in the representation of time. Te linearmetaphor is ubiquitous in everyday visual representations

of time as wellin almanacs, calendars, charts, and graphsof all sorts. Genealogical and evolutionary treesforms ofrepresenting temporal relationships that borrow both the

visual and the verbal figure of lineageare particularlyprominent.And, of course, similar observations may bemade about our ways of representing history.

Te timeline seems among the most inescapable meta-phors we have. And yet, in its modern form, with a singleaxis and a regular, measured distribution of dates, it is arelatively recent invention. Understood in this strict sense,

the timeline is not even years old. How this could bepossible, what alternatives existed before, and what com-peting possibilities for representing historical chronologyare still with us, is the subject of this book.

It should be said from the beginning that the relativeyouth of the timeline has little to do with technological


[4]_______________________________

Te Parian Marble is the oldestsurviving Greek chronological table:this piece of it, called the MarmorPurim, has been in Oxford since thelate seventeenth century. Te unknownauthor, working in / , tracedthe central events in history sincethe accession of King Cecrops inAthens in, by his computation, /. Te Marble offers dates for theFlood (that of Deucalion, not Noah),the introduction of agriculture byDemeter, and the fall of roy, as wellas many more recent events. Writtentables which covered a similar periodand range of topics were among thechief sources from which Eusebiusdrew his material for ancient Greekhistory.


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constraints. Tough technology plays an important role inour story, it doesnt drive it. Te principal issues here areconceptual. In the late eighteenth century, when the time-line began to flourish in Europe, sophisticated technologiesof printing and engraving had long been available, as hadtechniques for geometrical plotting and projection far morecomplex than were necessary for such simple diagrams.

What is more, by the eighteenth century the problem

of giving visual form to chronological information had alsobeen around for a very, very long time. [fig. 4] From theancient period to the modern, every historical culture hasdevised its own mechanisms for selecting and listing signif-icant events. Te Jews and Persians had their king lists; theGreeks, their tables of Olympiads; the Romans, their listsof consuls, and so forth. Te oldest surviving Greek chron-ological table, a list of rulers, events, and inventions, wascarved on marble in / . Te most elaborate Romanone, a set of lists of consuls and triumphs created under

Augustus, stood in the Forum. And, just as Lakoff andJohnson would have us believe, among these many devicesthe line appears repeatedly as both a visual form and a ver-bal metaphor. And yet, in all of these cultures, amid all ofthese forms, the simple, regular, measured timeline that isso second nature today, remains in the background. As a

norm, as an ideal standard of what history looks ltimeline does not appear until modernity.

Ancient and medieval historians had their ownniques of chronological notation. [figs.5 6] From thecentury, in Europe, the most powerful and typical o

was the table. Tough ancient chronologies were inin many different forms, among scholars the table foa normative quality much as the timeline does today.

the importance of the chronological table after thecentury can be credited to the Roman Christian Eusebius. Already in the fourth century Eusebideveloped a sophisticated table structure to organireconcile chronologies drawn from historical sourceall over the world. o clearly present the relations b

Jewish, pagan, and Christian histories, Eusebius ltheir chronologies in parallel columns that began wpatriarch Abraham and the founding of Assyria. Te

who moved through Eusebiuss history, page by pa

empires and kingdoms rise and fall, until all of themthe kingdom of the Jewscame under Romes unrule, just in time to make the Saviors message accesall of humanity. By comparing individual histories another and the uniform progress of the years, thecould see the hand of providence at work.


[56]_______________________________

Te Merton College copy of theChronicle of Eusebius, as translatedinto Latin and adapted by Jerome;transcribed in the mid-fifth centuryin Italy in red, green, and black inkon leaves. It is bound with theChronicle of Marcellinus Comes.


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Eusebius created his visually lucid Chroniclejust whenhe and other Christians were first adopting the codex, orbound book, in place of the scroll. Like other Christianinnovations in book design, the parallel tables and lucid,

year-by-year, decade-by-decade order of the Chroniclereflected the desire of early Christian scholars to make theBible and the sources vital for understanding it availableand readily accessible for quick reference. Te Chronicle

was widely read, copied, and imitated in the Middle Ages.And it catered to a desire for precision that other popularformslike the genealogical treecould not satisfy.

Eusebiuss chronological tables proved remarkablydurable, and as humanists in the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies took a new interest in establishing chronologi-cal intervals, they won renewed attention. [fig. 7] Moderneditions of Eusebius were among the first printed books,and they were among the most important reference worksin the collection of any early modern humanist scholar.

Te fifteenth-century Florentine bookseller Vespasianoda Bisticcia brilliant impresario of scribal book produc-tionmarketed a revised form of Eusebiuss work withgreat success to scholars and general readers. Humanists likePetrarch became fascinated by the historical and culturaldistances that separated them from ancient writers whom

they admired and from their own posterity. Petrarch care-fully indicated the present date in letters he addressed to theancients Cicero and Virgil and to future readers to empha-size the length of the interval that separated him from them:Written in the land of the living; on the right bank of theAdige, in Verona, a city of ranspadane Italy; on the th of

June, and in the year of that God whom you never knew theth. And, in setting these chronological distances, he

found help in the ancient model given by Eusebius.

During the Renaissance, scholars developed new kindsof visual organization, and adapted old forms, sometimeslong neglected, for the format of the printed book. But untilthe mid-eighteenth century, the Eusebian modela sim-ple matrix with kingdoms listed across the top of the pageand years listed down the left- or right-hand columns

was dominant. Tis visual structure suited the concerns ofRenaissance scholars well. It facilitated the organizationand coordination of chronological data from a wide variety

of sources. It provided a single structure capable of absorb-ing nearly any kind of data and negotiating the difficul-ties inevitable when different civilizations histories, withtheir different assumptions about time, were fused. It waseasy to produce and correct and allowed for quick access todatawhich the printers improved by adding alphabetized

[7]_______________________________

Fall of roy, Chronicle of Eusebius,fifteenth century


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indices and other aids. Above all, it still served as a detaileddiagram of providential time. From a graphic point of view,it was a chronological Wunderkammer, presenting Christian

world history in many small drawers.Still, experiments continued. Some were graphic, like

the effort to lay out all the main historical events on a cal-endar that stretched not from the Creation or Abrahamto the present but from January to December , with

important events in the past stacked up day by day, throughthe year. Some were technical. In antiquity and the MiddleAges, chronologers accepted older lists of rulers and eventsand did their best to integrate them into larger wholes. Inthe Renaissance, historians became more ambitious andcritical. eachers and theorists claimed, over and over again,that chronology and geography were the two eyes of his-tory: sources of precise, unquestionable information, whichintroduced order to the apparent chaos of events.

In geography, the visual metaphor fit beautifully.

Armed with new knowledge about the Earths surface,Renaissance mapmakers updated the ancient maps cre-ated by Ptolemy in the second century to include theAmericas, the Indian Ocean, and much else. At the sametime, techniques of mapping made advances, with strikingresults for both science and politics. By the seventeenth

century, the map had become a key symbol not onlypower of monarchs but of the power of knowledgCartography was a model of the new applied scienonce complex and precise, it also gave an impressimmediacy and realism.

At the level of detail, chronology followed a path. In the same period, astronomers and historiansas Gerardus Mercator, now famous as a cartogra

began collecting astronomical evidencerecords oeclipses and other celestial events mentioned by and medieval historians. Tey began to plot even

just against long series of years, but against lunar aneclipses that could be dated precisely to the day and thChronologies became precise and testable in a newand the new passion for exactitude was reflected into represent time in novel ways. Te early modern wosome remarkable, if often short-lived, experiments creation of graphic history, from the vivid images o

massacres, and troubles produced as a coherent seentrepreneurs and artists in Geneva in to thsively illustrated histories and travel accounts turnedthe house of Teodore de Bry in Frankfurt.o maners of the period, such as Walter Raleigh, the chronodimension of history was central. As Alexander Ros



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[8 ]_______________________________

Tis small chart, on the model of hispath-breakingA Chart of Biography() appeared in Joseph PriestleysTe History and Present State of

Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light,

and Colours (). It allows the readerto see at a glance which scientists livedwhen and gives an overall view ofscientific activity in the area of opticssince the year .


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in his continuation of Raleighs History of the World,History, indeed is the Body, but Chronologie the Soul ofHistorical Knowledge; for History without Chronologie, ora Relation of things past, without mentioning the imes in

which they were Acted, is like a Lump or Embryo withoutarticulation, or a Carcass without Life.

oward the end of the seventeenth century, technicaldevelopments in printing spurred further innovation, while

new techniques of engraving made practical larger and moredetailed book illustrations. Some chronologists began to takecues from cartographers, with beautiful results. Ultimately,though, the direct application of the geographic metaphorin the field of chronology proved awkward. Despite greatadvances in research techniques and the exploration ofmany new forms, representations of time mostly continuedto look very much as they had a millennium earlier whenthe chronographic table was first employed.

It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century

that a common visual vocabulary for time maps caughton. But the new linear formats of the eighteenth centurywere so quickly accepted that, within decades, it was hardto remember a time when they were not already in use. Tekey problem in chronographics, it turned out, was not howto design more complex visual schemesthe approach of

many would-be innovators in the seventeenth cenbut, rather, how to simplify, how to create a visual sto clearly communicate the uniformity, directionaliirreversibility of historical time.

Among the most important events of this perithe publication in of the Chart of BiographyEnglish scientist and theologian Joseph Priestley. [figthe level of basic technique, there was little that w

in Priestleys chart. It was a simple measured fieldates indicated along the top and bottom like distana ruler. Within the main field of the chart, horizontshowed when famous historical figures were born anthe length and position of each persons life was indby a mark that began at their date of birth and entheir date of death. Te Chart of Biographywas a strsimple diagram, and yet it proved a watershed.Tfollowed centuries of experimentation, it was the firsto present a complete and fully theorized visual voca

for a time map, and the first to successfully compethe matrix as a normative structure for representing chronology. And it came just at the right time. Prichart was not only effective in displaying dates, it al

vided an intuitive visual analogue for concepts of hiprogress that were becoming popular during the eigh



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century. In Priestleys chart, historical thought and newforms of graphic expression came into dialogue, and eachhad much to offer the other.

But as Priestley recognized, his innovations posedproblems too: historical narrative is not linear. It movesbackward and forward making comparisons and contrasts,and branches irregularly following plots and subplots. Partof the advantage of the matrix form was that it facilitated

the scholars understanding of the many intersecting tra-jectories of history. Te form of the timeline, by contrast,emphasized overarching patterns and the big story. Tisproved a great advantage in some respects, but not all. AndPriestley readily admitted this. For him, the timeline was amost excellent mechanical help to the knowledge of his-tory, not an image of history itself.

Nor was Priestley the only eighteenth-century writerto reflect on the limits of the linear metaphor. [fig. 9 ]During the same years that Priestley published his Chart

of Biography and its sequel, A New Chart of History, thenovelist Laurence Sterne was publishing his remarkablesatire on linear narrative, Te Life and Opinions of ristramShandy, Gentleman, replete with cooked diagrams mappingthe course of ristrams life story. Like Priestley, Sterneunderstood the linear representation of time as a complex

and artificial construction. But for Sterne, its problems out-weighed its advantages. Sterne writes:

Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer

drives on his mule,straight forward;for instance, from

Romeall the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his

head aside either to the right hand or to the left,he might

venture to foretell you an hour when he should get to his

journeys end:but the thing is, morally speaking, impos-sible; for, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty

deviations from a straight line to make with this or that

party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will

have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting

his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at

than he can fly.

For all of their differences, the works of both Priestley andSterne point to the technical ingenuity and the intensity of

the labor required to support a fantasy of linear time.Te timeline offered a new way of visualizing history.And it fundamentally changed the way that history wasspoken of as well. Yet it in no way closed off other visual and

verbal metaphors and mechanisms of representation. Tenineteenth century, which saw the extension of the timeline

[9 ]_______________________________

Laurence Sterne published his famoussatirical novel, Te Life and Opinions ofristram Shandy, Gentleman, in ninevolumes over the course of the s,just as Joseph Priestley was publishinghis great historical timelines. Te novelis purportedly the autobiography ofits central character, ristram Shandy,but the narration hinges on ristramsinability to tell the story withoutdigression. Like Priestley, Sterne wasinterested in the graphic representa-tion of time: in the novel, ristramoffers a set of diagrams representingthe narrative pattern of the first fourvolumes of his story.


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into many new areas of application, also saw the resurgenceof other temporal figures that had interacted and com-peted with linear imagery for many centuries. Troughoutthe medieval and early modern periods, for example, thestatue that Nebuchadnezzar dreamed of in Chapter ofthe book of Daniel, and that Daniel explicated as depictingthe four great empires that would rule the world in turn,could and did serve as an armature for world history. And

with the religious revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies, figures of Nebuchadnezzars statue spread againlike wildfire. But, in this new resurgence, something wasdifferent. Nineteenth-century visionaries used timelines toelucidate their allegories and to give them precision. Teybecame experts in visual code shifting, translating back andforth between the bare lines of Priestley and his emulatorsand the vivid images of the apocalyptic traditions.

During the mid-nineteenth century, a strong positiv-ist tendency also emerged in chronography, especially in

the areas where technical devices could be used to mea-sure and record events of historical significance. [fig.10] Tedevelopment of photography, film, and other imagingtechnologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries per-mitted the recording of time-sequenced phenomena, andever more precise instruments and methods, such as the

chronophotographic apparatuses of tienne-Jules and Eadweard Muybridge on the one hand and tring analysis of Andrew Ellicott Douglass on themade visible for the first time events taking place high and low speeds. Researchers such as these openpossibilities for the study of the past. Tey also in somencouraged people to think that historical events mrecorded and represented in truly objective ways.

But, while the convention of the timeline came tmore and more natural, its development tended also new questions. [fig.11] In some cases, filling in an idealine with more and better data only pushed it towaabsurd. Jacques Barbeu-Dubourgs Chronologie selle, mounted on a scroll and encased in a protectiv

was feet long. Later attempts to reanchor the timmaterial reference, as in the case of Charles Joseph Mfamous diagram, Carte figurative des pertes succeshommes de larme franaise dans la campagne de Russie

(Tematic map displaying the successive caof the French army in the Russian campaign produced results that were beautiful but ultimately pquestion the promise of the straight line.

Te visual simplicity of Minards diagram is pmaticas is the numbing pathos of its articulation


[10]________________________

Cross section of a giant sequoAmerican Museum of Naturain New York City, photographthe s. When the tree wasin California in , it stoodtall and measured feet arouthe base. Tis section containsannual rings, dating the tree tmid-sixth century. As current

ited, the rings are marked at iof years and inscribed witnotable historical events incluinvention of the ref racting telused by Galileo (), the foof Yale College (), and Nseizing power in France (


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[11]_______________________________

In the s, the French engineerCharles Joseph Minard devised a num-ber of new and influential infographictechniques. Among the most famous ofhis charts from this period is the Carte figurative des pertes successives

en hommes de larme franaise dans la

campagne de Russie com-

pares celle dHannibal durant la me

Guerre Punique. Te two diagrams,published together, show the size and

attrition of the armies of Hannibal inhis expedition across the Alps duringthe Punic wars and of Napoleon duringhis assault on Russia. Te colored bandin the diagrams indicates the armysstrength of numbersin both charts,one millimeter in thickness repre-sents ten thousand men. Te chart ofNapoleons march includes an indica-

tion of temperature as well.


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the space of the Russian winter. At the same time, throughcolor, angle, and shape, Minards chart marks the centralityof the idea of reversal in the thinking and telling of his-tory. Minards chart may be more accurate than Priestleys,not because it carries more or better historical detail butbecause it reads in the complex, sometimes paradoxical

way in which a real story is told. Te same could be saidfor the branching time map in Charles Renouviers

Uchronie (lutopie dans lhistoire): Esquisse historique apocry-phe du dveloppement de la civilisation europenne tel quil na

pas t, tel quil aurait pu tre (Uchronia [utopia in time]:An outline of the development of European civilization,not as it was, but as it could have been), which depictsboth the actual course of history and alternative paths thatmight have been if other historical choices and actions hadbeen taken. [fig. 12] Other philosophers took an even morecritical position. At the end of the nineteenth century, theFrench philosopher Henri Bergson decried the metaphor

of the timeline itself as a deceiving idol.

Reflection on the question of deep time, too, engenderedself-consciously estranging forms of temporal mapping, as inthe several billion year long timeline of future history thatthe philosopher and science fiction writer Olaf Stapledonused as the structure for his metahistorical parable, Last and

First Men,from . [fig. 13] Stapledon knew thhard to envision human history in terms of billions oHe also knew that projected on a timeline, his visionlook almost natural. Stapledon employed the inform of the timeline to shake up his readers assumabout the values implied in the very scale of our hinarratives. And in recent years similar devices havused effectively by environmentalist groups such

Long Now Foundation. [fig. 14] Troughout the pacenturies, from Francis Picabia to On Kawara and

J. Grandville to Saul Steinberg, visual artists have igated and poked fun at our presuppositions about grepresentation of historical time. Works such as theirto both change and persistence in the problem of clogical representationto the vitality of the forms by Eusebius and Priestley and to the conceptual diffithat they continue to present.

In Cartographies of ime, we offer a short account

modern forms of chronological representation emerghow they embedded themselves in the modern imagiIn doing so, we hope to shed some light on Westerof history, to clarify the complex relationship betweeand modes of representation, and to offer an introdgrammar of the graphics of historical representation


[12]_______________________________

Charles Renouvier, diagram in whichuppercase letters represent actualevents, lowercase letters events thatdid not happen, from


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[13]________________________

Manuscript timeline for OlafStapledons classic sciennovel, Last and First Men: A Sthe Near and Far Future. Staplbook gives an evolutionary hihumanity over two billion yeaeighteen great biological and revolutions. Te published woincludes a set of timelines dradifferent scales, from the histoto the cosmological. His mantimeline works the same way:vertical black lines represent tline at the far left is drawn to years to the inch; the nexyears to the inch, and each suscale is ten times the previousdiagonal lines project each scathe following ones. Vertical pustripes represent ages withoutculture. Vertical green stripes successive races of men.

__________Special Collections and Archives,

of Liverpool Library. Courtesy of J

Stapledon.

[14]_______________________________

Te Long Now Foundation, compara-tive time scales of the concept of thelong now,


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Te story of the timeline begins in the ancient world. [fig. 1 ]Greek and Roman scholars drew up lists of priests,Olympic winners, and magistrates, some of which werecarved in stone, others recorded in books. But it was thefourth-century Christian theologian Eusebius of Caesarea

who designed and composed the Chroniclethat became themodel for later timelines for centuries to come. Eusebiusset out to establish the place of Christianity in the his-

tory of the world told, in part, by the Jewish and Christianscriptures. But he also planned to synchronize with thiscentral narrative the histories of several other nations thathad maintained their own records and had their own con-

ventions of chronology, and that had figured prominentlyin the history of ancient Israel or the modern church.

Eusebius, who read the Bible in Greek, knew andused the Hexapla, a six-column polyglot Bible that anotherChristian scholar, Origen, had compiled in the third cen-tury. By lining up the original Hebrew, word for word, with

other columns that provided a Greek transliteration andfour different Greek translations, Origen enabled Christianreaders to see where their Greek Bible, which they hadinherited from the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria,differed from the Hebrew Bible used by Jews in Palestine.

Tis very long, very famous edition probably filled twenty

complete manuscripts. It proved the critical potential ofrows and columnsformats that had been much harderto use in rolls, the original books of the ancients, than they

were in the codex books that Christians favored. Tis for-mat provided Eusebius, as it had Origen, with a simpledevice for processing complex information. Nineteen par-allel columns, one to a nation, traced the rise and fall of theancient Assyrians, Egyptians, and Persians, as well as the

Greeks and the Romans, who still ruled the world.Eusebius coordinated all these histories, making clear,

for example, that the Greek philosopher Tales and theHebrew prophet Jeremiah had been near contemporaries.

By working down and across his tables, the reader could findout exactly which events of scripture history were contem-porary with particular events in pagan Greek or Egyptianantiquity. Ancient readers, who were familiar with illus-trated texts of many kinds, from epic poems to mathemati-cal works, recognized this feature as what made Eusebiuss

work distinctive. In the sixth century, Cassiodorus, a lateRoman scholar, described the Chronicle as an image ofhistorya genre that combined form and content, pagelayout and learning, in a new way.

Eusebiuss image of history taught one central lesson.Over time, the multiple kingdoms that had ruled parts of

ime ables

Chapter :


[1 ]_______________________________

Te fall of roy dominates this

opening in the Chronicleof Eusebius.


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the world disappeared. History funneled down into a singlestory, that of how Rome unified the world just in time togive the Messiah access to all peoples. Te Chronicle, inother words, was more than a highly legible record. It was adynamic hieroglyph of providential history.

ranslated into Latin and revised by Jerome in thefifth century, the Chroniclefound a long series of copyists,continuators, and imitators through late antiquity and the

Middle Ages. [fig. 2 ] Over and over again, scholars broughtthe content of the Chronicleup to date, while scribes madeadjustments in its format. Te fifteenth-century Florentinecitizen-scholar Matteo Palmieri is now best rememberedfor his treatise on the duties of citizens. In his own day,as the great bookdealer Vespasiano da Bisticci recalled, hisadditions to the Chronicle made his name: In Latin headded to the De emporibusof Eusebius the events of morethan a thousand years, taking up the work where S. Jeromeand Prosper had left it. It is evident that he must have had

great trouble in his researches to give an account of whathappened in those ages of obscure writers. Both he and hiswork became famous. He made many copies of it so that itwas found in all parts of the world.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, printers addedfeatures that manuscript versions had lacked. In the front

matter of the first edition of Eusebiuss work, the Mpublisher Boninus Mombritius boasted that nocould copy such an intricate and extensive work acckeeping the tables in order and putting all the kings places. Erhard Ratdolt, who printed his edition in in , added a special device made possible by thform pagination of printed books: an index of namthe words of a poem by the press corrector who d

the index,

So you wont wander, helpless, through this book,

Unable to find events and history,

Weve made an index. Just go there and look,

Te page you need wont be a mystery.

In the Paris publisher Robert Estienne asone of his correctors, Jehan de Mouveaux, to makeedition even more appealing. Mouveaux alphabetiz

Ratdolt editions index and added a poem of his owning credit for the innovationonly to lose it six yeawhen Estienne reprinted the edition with Mouveauxbut without his name. A vast scribal database, the Cregularly attracted the attentions of people like Mo

whom we would now call content providersanon

Chapter : ime ables

[2 ]_______________________________

Jerusalem falls, and Rome unifies theworld. From this page of the Chronicleon, only one empire appears.


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or little-known figures who still played important roles inreconfiguring and extending the text.

Mouveaux also emulated the medieval chroniclers andscribes who had updated the Chronicle, adding a printedsupplement containing such headline news as the discoveryof the New World. [figs. 35 ] Yet, like previous continu-ators, he made no effort to represent the proliferation ofkingdoms in the last few centuries in the design of his new

material. Instead of starting new parallel columns, he col-lapsed the histories of modern kingdoms and cities intoa single sequence with the earlier history of the RomanEmpire. Mouveaux used no visual conventionsexcept redink to indicate new popes and emperorsto convey thedramas he reported, which included everything from thedeaths of scholars and the rise and fall of prophets to warsand invasions.

Te new devices did not all work well. [figs. 610 ]Depicting time on paper posed complex and demandingproblems for printers, as it had for the scribes who worked

with Eusebius, and they did not always respond as creatively.For all the improvements that the Chronicle received inprint, it also looked more mechanical, and became harder toread, than its handwritten predecessors. Where the scribeshad arranged lists of rulers and texts about events on an

open field, the printers used horizontal and vertical lines todivide each page into small boxes. Tese did more to frag-ment and obscure information than to show the connec-tions between events. Tough the Chroniclewent throughmany editions, its later editors did little to make it morestriking or more user-f riendly. Tey did, however, bring the

work to many more readers, making them familiar with theparallel-column format.

Yet some of the chronicles composed after printingwas invented, including Carthusian Werner Rolevincksbest-selling Fasciculus temporum (Bundle of dates) of and Nuremberg humanist Hartmann Schedels lav-ishly illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle, offered read-ers more complex and vivid images of the past. Schedeland Rolevinck both knew, as readers of Eusebius did, thatfrom their inception universal histories were conceived asgraphic enterprises.Tey used a wide range of graphicdevices, old and new, to portray the course of history.

Te Fasciculus temporum, a fifty-page linear chart thatmoved from the Creation to the present, set out to givereaders an overview of world history: a readable visualpresentation that they could treat as both a memory sys-tem and as the spark for religious meditation. [fig. 11]Rolevinck used a system of coordinated circles to locate

[35]_______________________________

Tree different editions of EusebiussChronicleappear here. Jean deMouveaux, who edited the secondone in , cannibalized the indexof the first. Its anonymous creator

was avenged when Mouveauxs ownpublisher, Estienne, reprinted his indexin a edition but removed thepoem in which Mouveaux had claimedcredit for the innovation.


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Chapter : ime ables

[67]_______________________________

Te end of Matteo Palmierisfifteenth-century supplement toEusebiuss work and the beginningof Jean de Mouveauxs addition.Both men assumeas Eusebiushadthat the world was now a single,

[810]_______________________________

Jean de Mouveauxs supplementincluded reports of many kinds: fromcrosses that fell from the sky ontopeoples garments to the arrival of

Roman one, even though Pallived in uscany, a region splimedieval city-states, and Mouin the proudly independent kof France.

men from the new island acrossthe Atlantic to the French invasionof Italy in and the execution ofSavonarola in Florence four years later.


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[11]_______________________________

Werner Rolevincks fifteenth-centuryFasciculus temporum.


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Chapter : ime ables

biblical, classical, and modern rulers and writers in the flowof historical timea system so complicated that the firstprinter who grappled with it botched the job, producing anunintelligible text; later printers reassured readers that theyhad followed the authors manuscript. And the results weremost impressive: a neatly designed, powerfully horizontalline of time plunging forward from the Creation to thepresent. Around it neatly arranged and coordinated name

bubbles and extracts from historical texts put meat on thebooks numerical bones.

Schedel, by contrast, portrayed many of his hundredsof actors as the literal fruit of elaborate genealogical trees.[figs. 1213 ] He illustrated his work with a Ptolemaic mapof the world, dazzling perspective renderings of ancientand modern cities, and even handsome comic-strip imagesof the wild races of cannibals and dog-headed men thathad been reported in India since ancient times. Tough hisbook could not match the visual clarity and precision of

Rolevincks, it offered far more detailed visual and verbaldescriptions of the past.Tough both Rolevinck and Schedel composed their

works with print in mind, both drew design elements fromthe world of medieval manuscripts. [figs.1418 ] Many schol-ars and scribes had added new expedients to those devised

by Eusebius. In the late twelfth century, the Pteacher Peter of Poitiers composed a vividly coloredhistory of the Old estament for the use of studenused a system of lines and circles to clarify the teand genealogical relations between the Hebrew patand kings. Written not in normal codices but on hanparchment scrolls, copies of Peters work could ruor more feet long and were designed to be displa

classrooms.

With its illustrations of Noahs Ark, the oBabel, and the city of Nineveh, the Fasciculus temreproduced the conventions of older world chronicbiblical commentaries. [fig. 19] But Rolevinck fusform with Peter of Poitiers system, turning the vertimat and chopping what had been continuous ldescent into the normal page breaks of a codex. Hinterspersed morsels of text, after the manner of Euso that the reader could fix the dates for passages fr

Bible and the historians that, read on their own, floa chronological vacuum.Te Middle Ages saw multiple versions of

genealogy take shape, especially the so-called ree obased on Isaiah :, which traced the ancestry o[figs. 2021 ] In the same centuries, noble families be


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[1213]_______________________________

Te central visual metaphor of theearly sections of Hartmann Schedels

Nuremberg Chroniclewas the tree, towhich he affixed images of the Jewishpatriarchs, the rulers of Greece andRome, and many others. Tis pagedepicts the descendants of Noahsson Japhet. Yet Schedel lived in aworld buffeted by reports of strange,

even monstrous peoples far to theEastreports that went back toancient Greek sources. He found roomfor them, but could not place themon part of the tree that went back toAdam, since the Bible did not givethem a place in its genealogies.


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[1418 ]_______________________________

Peter of Poitiers splendid late-twelfth-century scroll shows the genealogyof the Savior, who appears at the top,supported by a great seven-branchedcandlestick and flanked by explana-tory text.

[19]_______________________________

Te elegance of Werner Rolevinckslayout in Fasciculus temporumis clearfrom this opening image, which showsNoahs Ark and the rainbow that fol-lowed the Flood.


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Chapter : ime ables

[2021 ]_______________________________

In contrast to Peter of Poitiers work,Princeton MS , created in the mid-thirteenth century, is wholly secular.A visually spare, elegant record ofEnglish history from Alfred the Great() to Henry III (),it includes twenty-three roundelportraits of English kings as well as arange of texts. Te seams show how

such rolls were created from two ormore skins (three, in this case). WherePeter of Poitiers work was designed asa visual aid for use in the classroom,this roll might have hung in a noble-mans great hall.


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structure themselves as vertical lineages, asserting theirpurity of blood and descent. Soon scholars began to pro-duce scrolls that represented these family lines. Like thebiblical ones, they often adopted the tree as a framework,and hung the generations of families members like fruitfrom its branches.Tese trees could become complex, evenchaotic: As genealogies were amplified in the course of thetwelfth century, pushing out in every direction, filling in

each sequence with more detail, adding names of youngersons, daughters, and ancestors not previously mentioned,the profile of the family tree became a skeleton of aristo-cratic society, revealing the multiple threads which crossedand re-crossed, binding regional nobilities into ever moreintegrated congeries of family relations.Still, some of thescrolls that record them reveal the lucidity and beauty ofthe format.

Schedel emulated the arboreal format of the genealo-gies, though he chopped the trees into irregular segmentsto fit the page openings in his book. He thus used the gen-erations of patriarchs and kings, rather than a simple time-line, as the armature for his history. [figs.2229 ] Schedel alsofused even older biblical and chronological conventions withthe genealogy format. In hisNuremberg Chronicle, he illus-trated the creation of the world through a striking series of

seven panels representing the days of Creation. Manuscriptilluminators in medieval Paris had used tiny, elegant imagesto identify the days of Creation in Genesis, but Schedelsimplified, enlarged, and dramatized these images in a waythat reflected his understanding of the aesthetics of print.

Both Rolevinck and Schedel devised ingenious graphicsolutions for problems that had confronted chronologersfor centuries. [figs. 3031] Unhappily aware that the ancient

versions of the Bible in Hebrew and Greek differed radi-cally on the interval between the Creation and the Flood(, years and , years respectively), Eusebius hadsimply omitted the earliest period of history, the storiestold in Genesis, from his Chronicle. Rolevinck borroweda more elegant solution from the world chronicles of thethirteenth century. At the horizontal center of each page heplaced what he described as circles with the right namesof persons for each date, and two lines above and below:a double axis.Ten he computed the dates that markedoff the intervals of this axis and recorded them in two lin-ear series: one, on top, counted forward from the Creation(traditionally called , years of the world); one, on thebottom line, counted backward from the birth of Christ(in modern terms, years ). Critical readers, Rolevinckexplained, could use the latter, newer system to compare

[2228]_______________________________

Hartmann Schedel, the days ofCreation from theNurembergChronicle,


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Chapter : ime ables


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[30]_______________________________

Te destruction of Sodom andGomorrah, from Rolevincks Fasciculustemporum(Bundle of dates). Tereader who has annotated this open-ing was interested in recomputing

Rolevincks dates, but left no commenton the destruction of the cities.

[29 ]_______________________________

Te band of illustrations on the leftof the beginning of Genesis in thistwelfth-century Paris Bible depictsthe sequence of the Creation, moredelicately but less dramatically thanSchedel would.


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Chapter : ime ables

[31]_______________________________

Rolevinck was not the only chronolo-ger who attempted to create a worldchronicle in the form of a codexgenealogy. Te anonymous Chronicarum et historiarum epitome,(Epitome of chronicles and histories)took on virtually the same project. InRolevincks text, horizontal streamsconnect seamlessly from page topage. By contrast, the designer of theChronicarumepitome has orientedhis time stream vertically and addedreference letters so that the readermay correctly connect the genealogicalchains from one page to the next.


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the different ancient chronologies. Many followed hisadvice, entering their computations in the text as they readalong. Te graphic clarity of his work, Rolevinck argued,made it accessible to anyonemade it an image of his-tory and one even more user-friendly than the Chronicle:Te method is very simple, and so friendly even to cruderustic minds that it could be represented on a wall.

Schedela citizen of Nuremberg, a great merchant

city and a prime node on Europes communications net-worksknew that his readers were experiencing history innew ways and through new media. [figs. 3235] A massivebook, heavy with text, the Nuremberg Chronicle incorpo-rated many descriptions of events, each consisting of ashort text with an illustration. In appearance and content,these vignettes imitated the broadsides then in circula-tion, on which Schedels readersand Schedel himselfdepended for breaking news of the fall of Constantinople,the appearance of comets, and the birth of monsters.(Schedel underlined the resemblance by pasting broad-sides that appeared after the Chronicleinto his own copyof the book.)

Where the earlier parts of Schedels NurembergChronicle followed the stately tempo of traditional worldhistories, the later ones, with their gripping images of a

naked witch flying, Jews murdering a Christian child, andthe events foretold in the Book of Revelation, representedhistory as a kaleidoscopic mass of places and events, hur-tling forward to its end. Schedel even gave readers a fewblank pages between their own time and the Apocalypsethat they could fill inand many didwith what he clearlyexpected to be the short remaining history of the world.Eusebius had warned his readers that humans could not

know when time began or when it would end. Schedel, bycontrast, set firm borders at both ends of his map of time.

Eusebius expected scribes to find his Chroniclehard toreproduce, and inserted instructions in the hope that they

would at least do their best. [figs. 3638] But the demandsthat chronologers like Rolevinck and Schedel made of those

who reproduced their books were greater, as Rolevinckhimself admitted:

It cost me much hard work to lay out the lines of Assyrian

and Roman history from various sources. Accordingly, I ask

anyone who decides to copy this work to pay close atten-

tion to the spaces and the numbers that correspond to them,

and make them no longer or smaller than in the model.

Otherwise his work will go to waste.

[3235]_______________________________

Tese images from the later pages ofSchedels Chronicledramatize recentevents exactly as they were dramatizedin the single-page newsletters thatspread information from city to city in

the early modern world. Here Schedeland his illustrators portray a nakedwitch riding with a devil, the first suchimage recorded; the drowning of impi-ous men and women; the killingof a Christian boy in rent, supposedlyby Jews, who were tortured until theyconfessed; and the sect led by theDrummer of Niklashausen, a popularprophet, in . Te terrible potentialof the modern media to spread imagesthat breed hate and disgust is alreadyvisible in Schedels timeline.


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Chapter : ime ables


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Schedel took even stronger precautions: he laid out hisNuremberg Chroniclepage by page and image by image, andthe contract he made with his publisher, Anton Koberger,stated stringent conditions for cooperationall involved

worked in a room dedicated solely to its production inKobergers printing shop.

Chronologers needed to balance the competing claimsof scholarly honesty, which required Rolevinck to admit

that he could not establish a single, absolutely valid chro-nology for the world, with those of sacred history, whichseemed to demand a continuous timeline from Creationto their own day. Tey had to devise a page design thatcould accommodate both inflexible lists of minute facts,such as names and dates of rulers, and large blocks ofdescriptive text. Tey also hoped to make their informa-tion more accessible than scribes could. While some oftheir inventions, like indexing, served that end, others, likethe typographical grid that made Eusebius harder to read,

were less successful.Most important, chronologers wanted to attain a rea-sonable level of precision while still making the past vivid.

echnical changesfor example, numbering leaves orpages and compiling indexeshelped readers find whatthey needed in the mass of details. Collaboration among

authors, artists, and printers solved other problems, resultingin Schedels crisp new full-page views of Cologne, Venice,Rome, and Nuremberg, which outshine the vivid but tinycity views in some editions of Rolevinck. Yet some prob-lems defied solution: for example, how to provide imagesfor cities for which no drawing or woodcut was accessible,a conundrum that led both Rolevinck and Schedel to useiconic default images for many of the cities that they men-

tioned, even though they offered up-to-date, detailed viewsof others. Neither Rolevinck nor Schedel, moreover, man-aged to work out a way of combining genealogy, a formin which time seems to consist of an irregular series ofhuman generations, with chronology, in which time is reg-ular, uniform, and represented by numbers. Plenty of roomremained for new ideas and forms.

In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-ries, moreover, the task of drawing up a chronological tablegradually became even more demanding than it had been

for Eusebius or Rolevinck. By the s European scholarshad at their fingertips a massive volume of new informa-tion drawn from historiography, paleography, numismatics,astronomy, and other fields. And this information was notlimited to the European or Christian traditions; lists of rul-ers from distant lands such as Egypt, Persia, the Americas,

[3638 ]_______________________________

Schedel left the reader three blankleaves to fill in with the events thatwould take place between the publica-tion of the Chroniclein and theend of time. He also used woodcutsshowing the imagery of the Book ofRevelation to show the course thatwould follow. Tese visions of thefuture made a dramatic climax to the

fast-paced, vividly illustrated later sec-tions of theNurembergChronicle.


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Chapter : ime ables


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and China arrived in the second half of the sixteenth centuryand the first years of the seventeenth. Some of the dynastiesrecorded by these lists had existed before the date where theBible set Creation, a fact which inspired both the Englishplaywright Christopher Marlowe and the Italian phi-losopher Giordano Bruno to abandon biblical chronologyentirely. Tey also figured in the calculations of less radicalchronologers, who worried endlessly about how to deal with

the challenges they posed to the authority of Genesis.

Reconciling such diverse sources required wide knowl-edge and inventive technique. In theory, the chronologerstrove to create a historical framework in which everyrecorded human act and achievement would have its place.Early modern chronologers promised their readers, asEusebius had, that they would provide a kind of histori-cal Rosetta stone, a tool that would permit them to trans-late lists of names and dates from many different sourcesand languages into a single, coherent version of the past.

Te urgency of such work, of course, varied greatly in rela-tion to the eschatological position of the reader: for some(straight down to the present day), the study of chronology

was motivated by the desire to discover the exact date ofapocalypse. Others bore in mind the words of the resur-rected Jesus to his followers: It is not for you to know the

times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his ownpower (Acts :). For them, the end of time was not acollective experience of horror and rapture, but somethingevery individual encountered in his own life.

Annius of Viterbo, a Dominican theologian, scholar,and con-man, published in a set of twenty-fourancient texts equipped with massive commentary. [fig. 39]

While he did not fabricate every entry in this very inven-

tive chronology, he did compose most of the works thathe claimed were the ancient histories of Egypt, Chaldea,and Persia that Eusebius and other ancient writers hadquoted. Annius adorned his book with austere, horizontallyoriented genealogical tablesalso an alluring mix of his-tory and fantasywhich he used to show that his patrons,the Borgia Pope Alexander VI and the Catholic kings ofSpain, could trace their ancestry back to Isis and Osiris. Healso found room in early times for the forefathers of theLombards, the French, and the British.

A generation later, when the German scholar SimonGrynaeus found it too hard to compile a single little tableorganized by Olympiads of the origins, growth and endsof all states, he persuaded a colleague, the pastor andHebraist Paulus Constantinus Phrygio, to take on the job.[figs.4042] Phrygio not only agreed, he made the table into

[39]_______________________________

Tis genealogy traces the ancestryof the fifteenth-century inhabitantsof Europe back to Japhet, one ofthe three sons of Noah. Annius ofViterbo invented mythical foundersfor modern nations, drawing theirnames from the names of their people.For example, the modern Lombards,

[4042 ]_______________________________

In this strikingly handsomebook, published in , PaulusConstantinus Phrygio lays out humanhistory on a horizontal line. ToughPhrygios work expresses the forwardmovement of history, the relativelyweak axis of years along the top of thepage makes the actual dates of events

or Longobards, were descendedfrom Longo and Bardus. Using thesemethods he offered modern rulersincluding his own patrons, the BorgiaPope Alexander VI and the Catholickings of Spainproud genealogies.(Alexander turned out to be descendedfrom the Egyptian god Osiris.)


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hard to follow. Even such turningpoints as the Crucifixion and the fallof Jerusalem, seen in the last image, arehard to locate. Tese defects of layoutmay explain why Phrygios work wasnot reprinted. But its content may alsohave played a part. His lists of earlydynasties come from the texts forgedby Annius of V iterbo, and his workwas received with skepticism by morelearned scholars.


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[4344]_______________________________

Albrecht Drers paper triumphal archfor Maximilian I. Maximilian usedvivid printed materials like this toestablish the genealogy of his houseand the authority of his imperialthrone, both of which were actuallynewer, and shakier, than he was willingto admit.


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a full-scale book. Neater and more abstract than Rolevincksbook or Schedels, Phrygios Chronicum (Chronicle) laid outhistory from the Flood to the present on several parallellines of rulers. Like Rolevinck and Annius, he oriented histimeline horizontally rather than vertically, adding the num-bers of years from the Flood to each ruler or event. Phrygioemulated Annius in setting out to show the similaritiesand connections between ancient and modern times, but

he found a way to incorporate far more information whiledoing so. In the later part of his work, he added on newcolumns tracing the history of the Holy Roman Empire, thepapacy, and the kingdoms of France and Britain as they tookshape, one after another. Like Rolevinck, Phrygio saw that ahorizontal format made it easier to fit texts of quite differentlengths between rows of rulers names. Unlike many of hispredecessors and successors, he also used his chosen formatto make an important historical point: that Rome no lon-ger ruled the world. France, for example, was an indepen-

dent kingdom, not a province of the Roman Empire, andreceived its own line of rulers. Phrygios work had elegance,horizontal energy, and willingness to depart from conven-tion. Unfortunately, the books appearance of lucidity andlogic is somewhat belied by its content. Phrygio earned hisreaders trust by naming the authors from whom he drew his

information. But many of them were Anniuss forgeries. Hisdecision to run the axis of years from the Creation along thetop of the pages made his work useless for anyone relying onthe Greek text of the Bible, though Rolevinck had alreadyshown how to solve this problem. Still, Phrygios case showsthat authors and printers could mobilize ingenious visualdevices in the hope of nailing chronology down in a single,memorable format.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, genealogywould serve other functions as well. Some were as fantastic asthose of Anniusespecially since respectable scholars earnedfees by selling noblemen scholarly looking genealogies thattraced their ancestors back to ancient Rome or Egypt.Inthe Holy Roman Empire, where many princes found it hardto produce male heirs who lived to maturity, simply main-taining a line of succession seemed to be the arcanum imperii,the key to political as well as familial success.

Every dynasty put its lineage on show, from the

Habsburgs to the rulers of Saxony, and printers deployeda range of images, from the traditional tree to the openhandlong used as a mnemonic deviceto help readersfollow and master these vital succession lists. [figs. 4344 ]Among the most striking of these productions was the

wall-sized, multi-panel print of a triumphal arch designed


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for Maximilian I by Albrecht Drer around . Toughhe never intended for it to be built, the design on paperafforded a spectacular virtual tour of the Habsburgsancestry.

Like other Renaissance princes, the Habsburgs proudlycultivated the study of their own genealogy. Controversiesswarmed around central links in their ancestral chains,so Maximilians erudite courtiers, Conrad Peutinger and

Johannes Stabius, collected and sifted information fromevery source they could find. At all costs, they had to showthat the Habsburgs descended from an independent lineas venerable as that of the kings of France and the rulersof ancient Rome. Tey did this job with brio, tracing theorigins of the Habsburgs back to Clovis, king of the Franks,and those of Clovis back to Hector of roy. Further lines ofinquiry turned up solid genealogical connections betweenMaximilians line and the biblical patriarchs (above all,Noah), the Greek gods Saturn and Jupiter, andin keep-

ing with the Egyptomania fashionable at the timethegod Osiris. When Maximilian learned that his schol-ars traced his line back to Japhet, the son of Noah, whoexposed his fathers genitals, he claimed to be shocked.Infact, though, their enterprise was normal, and made effec-tive use of history. Te triumphal archshowed anyone who

approached it that Maximilian was not only a greabut the culmination of world history.

Many writers deployed genealogy in more tradways. [figs.4547] Since Eusebius and Peter of Poitiernologies and genealogies had served at least two funthey assembled information of value and tied it to sand memorable graphics. Te Saxon scholar Lorenzoffered readers the traditional ree of Jesse, a magn

Saxon genealogical tree, and the basic list of Saxontheir names inscribed on the joints of the fingers hand and thus easy to master.

In other hands, however, genealogy became a fprecise, intensive scholarship. [figs. 4849 ] Reiner R

who taught history at Helmstedt and elsewhere, cthat genealogy illuminates all the other parts of hand without it they bear basically no fruit at all.all, he pointed out, anyone can see that histories deal with the persons who did things, and that the

be separated out into families. Like states, he thfamilies had set periods of existence, during whicgrew from humble origins to positions of power andeclined and died.Reinecks chronology included of skeletal genealogies. In fact, these became the history as he portrayed it. But he stripped away the a


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[4547]________________________

Tese genealogies of Jesus andrulers of Saxonyall taken frsame book, Lorenz FaustsAnstatuae Danielis (An anatomy Daniels statue)illustrate thtence of medieval conventioninto the age of print.

[48 ]_______________________________

Reiner Reineck, geneological chartfrom Suntagma, Basel, .Reineck saw genealogy as the keyto understanding the past. In hisenormous Suntagma, he turned

world history into a long seriefamily treesin this case, thaemenids, the founders of thedom of Macedonia.


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decoration with which Schedel and others had given thispresentation visual drama and appeal. For Reineck, geneal-ogy was so important that it needed no adornment. Still oth-ers, like the Jena University history professor Elias Reusner,used genealogy as a polemical weapon. By representing thefamily ties of Henry III, the Catholic king of France, andHenry of Navarre, his Protestant heir, as the branches of atree trunk, he made clear that no attackeven the vicious

one of the Catholic Duke of Guisecould break them.[fig.50] Others, such as the Swiss scholar Heinrich Glareanus,applied the model of the comparative table to new sub-

jects. Glareanus drew up chronologies for individual texts:in the first instance for Livys history of Rome, writtenunder Augustus and treasured by Renaissance readers fromPetrarch to Machiavelli. Livy dated his narrative year by

year, making it hard for readers to coordinate his historywith other accounts or with the Bible. Glareanus made clearthat the founding of Rome and the reign of Salmanassar

in Assyria were almost exactly contemporary, and con-nected the Punic wars to other events in Mediterraneanhistory. As he redid his work for later editions, it became soinformative that he circulated it independently as a tabularchronology of Rome. [fig.51] By contrast, the British math-ematician and historian Henry Savile applied the Eusebian

format to impose order on a period that no great writer haddescribed, the early Middle Ages.

Graphic innovation and the repurposing of older expe-dients both flourished, especially when applied to religiousends. [fig. 52] Jean Boulaese, a Parisian priest and professorof Hebrew, managed to compose exactly the sort of single,comprehensive table that Grynaeus had found too complexto produce. His wall chart, designed for use by students at

the University of Paris in the s, carefully separated bib-lical history, which began with the Creation, from pagan,

which began only after the Flood. And he divided secularhistory into four distinct periods. By doing so, he made all ofhuman history fit the scheme laid down long before by thebiblical prophet Daniel, who had foretold that four empires

would rule the world in turn. Many Protestants shared theCatholic Boulaeses faith in this schemeand agreed withhim that they were living in the fourth, or Roman, empire,

which would soon come to an end. (Boulaese, an exorcist as

well as a chronologer, witnessed many scenes that he tookas evidence that the millennium was approaching.) Butthe names and dates that crowd Boulaeses image made itslarger providential order hard to discern. Protestants seek-ing to teach the same lessons found much more inventive

visual models for doing so.

[50]_______________________________

In his edition of Livys history ofRome, the historian and music theoristHeinrich Glareanus lays out, in fulldetail, a Eusebian coordinate systemof dates against which readers couldfollow the events without becomingconfused or lost. Chronologies weredrawn up for a number of authors,including the epic poet Virgil.

[49]_______________________________

Elias Reusner, genealogy as chronol-

ogy, Frankfurt,


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[51]________________________

Henry Savile, scholar and scieuses the tools of world chronolay out the rulers and bishopsmedieval Britain in this from his collection of the medhistorians of Britain.

[52 ]_______________________________

Tis dense, crowded table wasprintedas Peter of Poitiers tablewas drawn and painted four hundredyears beforefor Parisian universitystudents. By the late sixteenth century,however, the range of peoples andevents covered in world history hadexpanded enormously. Jean Boulaese,

the Catholic polemicist who cre-ated this crowded time chart for hisstudents, tried to achieve visual clarityby tracing the histories of the churchand of secular kingdoms in separate,parallel areas.


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Like many prophetic texts in the second and first cen-turies , Daniels work consoled the Jews, predicting theimminent destruction of the pagan empires and the end ofthe Jews subjection. Te text interpreted the past and pre-dicted the future, treating both as direct expressions of Gods

will. At one point, an image of a statue appears in a dreamto Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. Commanded by theking, Daniel first describes and then explains the statue:

Tis images head [was] of fine gold, his breast and his arms

of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, his

feet part of iron and part of clay. . . .A stone was cut out with-

out hands, which smote the image upon his feet [that were]

of iron and clay, and broke them to pieces. Ten was the iron,

the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces

together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing

floors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was

found for them: and the stone that smote the image became

a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.

Tis vision neatly combined two complementary timemaps or schemes: the vision, derived from Persia, of historyas a long strife between good and evil, destined to end ina great battle, and the sense, derived from the Greeks, that

the earliest men had been stronger and more virtuous thantheir descendents, so that each generation, or kingdom, was

worse than the one that preceded it.Where Eusebiussparallel columns brought out the divinely imposed orderof the past, the statue, with its gradually deteriorating rawmaterials and impending doom, welded the past to thefuture and both to a vision of Gods plan for mankind.

Eusebius had rejected the idea that chronologers

should predict the future, particularly the end of the world.But both in his time and later, many chronologers disagreed.Schedel, as we have seen, incorporated a rough estimate ofhow long history might last into the Nuremberg Chronicle.Rolevinck stated that

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