In A New History of the Humanities, Rens Bod aims to cover the “greatest hits” of the humanities from Antiquity to present day, with a goal to underline the substantial impact of the humanities on the development of humanity over centuries. He also suggests that a history of the humanities is timely, since dozens of histories of science exist.  Of note, Bod is specifically considering the humanities as “the disciplines that investigate the expressions of the human mind” (1, emphasis author’s), whereby the expressions of the human mind include language, music, art, literature, theatre and poetry, and so the humanities includes philology, linguistics, musicology, art history, literary studies, and theatre studies (1). He argues that although there is no one model for the humanities, there are common humanistic methods and practices (4). Bod takes this as his guiding method for the book; that is, he focuses on principles and patterns across the history of the humanities in order to emphasize their impact on the world—not least of all in the development of poetics, the rise and then fall of a Bible-dominated culture in Europe, and the Enlightenment.

 

Work cited

Bod, Rens. 2013. A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford, UK: U Oxford P.