This chapter refutes Dover’s arguments that anachronisms and an unstageable change of speaker demonstrate the text of the (second) Clouds that we have to be an incomplete revision, intended as a text only for reading, not for performance.

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s simile world becomes a more fragmented and less cohesive place where simile characters from the past may appear rarely or not at all, similes are so short that they often do not achieve the immersive effects typical of the simile worlds of earlier epics, and they do not work hand in hand with the story to bring forward key themes. Some conventional simile features take on different functions in the Metamorphoses, such as the chase similes that describe erotic pursuits instead of battle scenes. Main roles become cameo appearances while minor characters from earlier epics may find themselves at center stage. Yet similes retain many of their familiar qualities, and some of the poem’s most memorable moments are achieved in part with heart-pounding scenes familiar from earlier epics of predators chasing their prey, raging fires, battle scenes, and sailing. Similes help the Metamorphoses both to claim the epic genre for itself and to take that genre to new places it had never been before. The story and the similes tell a tale of constancy and change, of passion rather than battle as the most important arena for human conflict, and of storytelling itself.

In July 2018, the York Civic Trust unveiled the first rainbow plaque in the UK, commemorating Anne Lister’s union with Ann Walker. The plaque, at the church in York where the two women celebrated their bond by taking communion together, sparked controversy with its labelling of Lister as ‘gender-nonconforming entrepreneur’. Following a consultation period, a new plaque describing Lister as ‘lesbian and diarist’ was unveiled in February 2019. On 3 April 2019 (Lister’s birthday), a third plaque was presented at Shibden Hall, the house and estate she inherited from her uncle. Avoiding the controversy of the first York plaque, it described Lister as ‘diarist, businesswoman, landowner, traveller and lesbian who recorded much of her personal life in a secret code’. Lister herself repeatedly insists on the naturalness of her desire for women, as well as on her own exceptionalism. Yet her diaries also show her looking for women like her, not as sexual partners but as models (the Ladies of Llangollen) or as kindred spirits (the masculine bluestocking Miss Pickford). This chapter explores the implications and the stakes of attempts to classify and categorise Anne Lister according to past and present rubrics of gender and sexuality.

This chapter explores ideals and practices of turning classical histories into political lessons for the present, focusing on a number of individuals who translated the histories of Tacitus into Spanish, while they also served their king as soldiers, counsellors and informants. All testified about the practical value of Tacitus in the present, as they struggled with the internal contradictions and the fact that their author had produced the texts many centuries ago, in a different, pagan world. The counsel of historical experience was tirelessly advocated in reason-of-state discourse, and this chapter shows that the call was answered in practice as the Tacitists in various capacities engaged with the problem of the Dutch Revolt. The chapter argues that although they were well aware of change, they had no scruples in using anachronism and historical analogies, or using the ancients as rhetorical tools to express their ideas and further their political aims. Memorials and pieces of counsel were written from the perspective of events from recent history and could effortlessly be placed alongside Tacitean phrases. Yet the ancient past was also a safe space that could be used to criticize present policies or express warnings, without infringing on the domain of Providence.

Shakespeare’s plays suggest not so much a preoccupation with war as his recognition of its inescapability. He seems never to have experienced warfare firsthand, but no doubt had spoken to people who had. But most of what Shakespeare knew came from books. Chief among these were the chronicles he depended upon for his histories, primarily the group project we refer to as “Holinshed.” What he found was that warfare is more or less indistinguishable over time, a fact revealed in the tedious repetition of battle accounts, further blurred by the echoing of aristocratic family names over generations – and, in the often-overlooked source of the 1577 Holinshed, in which the recycling of a limited number of woodcuts to illustrate events separated by hundreds of years reveals the dispiriting reality. Ironically, it is in Henry V, Shakespeare’s seemingly most triumphal presentation of English military heroism, in which “the question of these wars” finds an answer.

This chapter relates the turn to history in international law to the corresponding international turn taken in the discipline of history. It explores the effects of translating the stakes of those turns into a technical debate involving abstract claims about the proper scientific methods for understanding the past of international law. The chapter analyses the wide-ranging set of arguments about the scientific nature of empiricist history and the partisan character of international legal arguments that have accompanied the turn to history. It argues that international lawyers have been uncritically receptive of the idea that empiricist historical methods offer a set of technical rules to which legal scholars should conform when writing about the past.

The historiography of mathematics in the Renaissance involves two kinds of anachronism. First, the tendency to anachronism in the authors themselves, whose understanding of broad historical structures and of the development of mathematics may be colored by concerns of their own time. And second, our anachronism in reading these histories of mathematics as if they were attempting precisely the same thing as modern historians of mathematics. This article focuses on the author of the first modern work dedicated to the history of mathematics, Petrus Ramus (1515–1572), singling out three occasions in which his historical account seems to diverge widely from that of modern historians, and examining them in the light of both types of anachronism. First, in his account of the development of mathematics in the early Platonic Academy; second, his assessment of Eudoxus of Cnidus; and finally in his dating of the Neoplatonic philosopher and commentator on Euclid, Proclus.

Different approaches to past mathematical texts are reviewed. The question addressed is: should we stress the continuity of past mathematics with the mathematics practiced today, or should we emphasize its difference, namely what makes it a product of a distant mathematical culture?

A recurring historical narrative depicts Jean-Victor Poncelet, Michel Chasles, Jakob Steiner, and other early-nineteenth-century geometers as striving and failing to create a non-metric projective geometry. According to this historiographical view, only in the middle of the century with Karl Christian Georg von Staudt would projective geometry be liberated from its ties to measurement. This claim for geometers before von Staudt is what I will call the non-metric projective anachronism. This chapter will consider how and why pure geometers of the early nineteenth century came to be seen as opposed to measurement. A focus on Klein will capture features of late-nineteenth-century mathematics that made the non-metric projective anachronism so appealing.

The spectrum of practises of mathematical reconstruction is explored on the basis of a case study on a partly successful mathematical reconstruction of the Chinese Remainder Theorem. In the 19th century L. Matthiessen reconstructed two versions of this theorem on the basis of a corrupted secondary source concerning ancient Chinese mathematics. He identified the more restricted version of the theorem with a Gaussian approach, whereas the other more general one was described as something new surpassing contemporary mathematical European achievements. I identify and compare two different types of mathematical reconstructions in Matthiessen's contributions, and explore their historiographic functions. To capture the relation between mathematical reconstruction and anachronism, the time scheme in the case study is analyzed and linked to the concept of pluritemporality according to Landwehr. This more complex perspective on the category of time in historical research suggests that anachronism should be re-conceptualized. It allows for a discussion of some of the conditions under which mathematical reconstructions can be used in a historiographically sensitive way in a different setting. I argue that this kind of historiographically sensitive mathematical reconstruction can be regarded as a productive historiographical method

Historians are constantly confronted with the twin problems of translating texts and interpreting their meanings. When mathematicians like Georg Cantor or Abraham Robinson demonstrate the consistency of concepts that, since the paradoxes of Zeno and Democritus, have been assumed to be paradoxical notions like infinitesimals or the actual infinite, how should the works of earlier mathematicians be regarded, who either used such concepts or believed they had proven their impossibility? Is it anachronistic to use nonstandard analysis or transfinite numbers to “rehabilitate” or explain the works of Leibniz, Euler, Cauchy, or Peirce, for example, as recent mathematicians, historians, and philosophers of mathematics have attempted? At the other extreme, chronologically, how may ideas readily accepted in the West – like incommensurable numbers, parallel lines, and similar triangles – but foreign to traditional Chinese mathematics have adversely affected the interpretations of ancient Chinese mathematical works?

This chapter is devoted to what I call textual anachronism. By this expression, I refer to forms of anachronism that lead to interpreting ancient texts on the basis of anachronistic assumptions with respect to how these texts made sense for the ancient actors. This is, for instance, the case when historians take the textual components that they find in ancient documents (like a mathematical problem, an algorithm, a proof, and a diagram), as they would take what they consider to be modern counterparts, and interpret these components on that basis. I argue that this form of anachronism has caused misinterpretations of several kinds, which I identify and analyze, using examples from four historical contexts. I further discuss the historiographical implications of this type of anachronism. I conclude with the thesis that one can limit the effects of this form of anachronism by using a historical approach to forms of text. Moreover, a historical approach of this kind sheds light on the fact that anachronism has a history that might also be interesting to consider.

Two parts of analysis to which Leonhard Euler contributed in the 1740s and 1750s are the calculus of variations and the theory of infinite series. Certain concepts from these subjects occupy a fundamental place in modern analysis, but do not appear in the work of either Euler or his contemporaries. In the case of variational calculus there is the concept of the invariance of the variational equations; in the case of infinite series there is the concept of summability. However, some modern mathematicians have suggested that early forms of these concepts are implicitly present in Euler’s writings. We examine Euler’s work in calculus of variations and infinite series and reflect on this work in relation to modern theories.

Scholars tend to assume that the mathematical sciences and philosophy were distinct disciplines in antiquity, as they are today. From the fourth century B.C.E. onward, mathematicians and philosophers did distinguish themselves. They criticized each other’s work and, in some areas of the Greek world, strong rivalries developed between philosophers and mathematicians. I argue, however, that the distinction between philosophers and mathematicians did not entail that their fields of inquiry were distinct. This chapter examines the relationship between the mathematical sciences and philosophy from the perspective of the practitioners of the mathematical sciences, in particular, Archytas of Tarentum, Hero of Alexandria, and Claudius Ptolemy. I argue that these practitioners viewed the relationship between the mathematical sciences and philosophy as more complex, where the mathematical sciences are not only in relation to philosophy but, even stronger, forms of philosophy.  Moreover, the mathematical sciences answer some of the most fundamental questions of philosophy, e.g., how to obtain knowledge, how to form a just society, and how to attain the good life.

The foremost historiographic challenge in interpreting pre-modern Indian mathematics is arguably not anachronism so much as anachorism, the blurring of geographical or cultural rather than chronological distinctions. For example, historians struggle constantly with ways to avoid or explain calling Indian analyses of right-triangle relations “Pythagorean”, or using the term “Diophantine equations” for the type of problems designated in Sanskrit as \kuttaka\ or \varga-\prakrti. Nonetheless, the combination of anachronism and anachorism provides the study of Indian mathematics with a powerful lens, which clarifies even as it distorts. This paper will address such trade-offs between popular misconceptions and deeper insights, especially in the application of concepts from the historiography of early modern European calculus to infinitesimal methods used in Sanskrit mathematics of the early to mid-second millennium.

Roberto Bonola, in his celebrated history of non-Euclidean geometry, imported a distinction between elementary and advanced mathematics commonly drawn around 1900 back to the discoveries of the 1820s and 1830s. In so doing he fell into anachronism and misrepresented the subject, most obviously in his treatment of the work of Lobachevskii.

This chapter discusses the concept of ‘late style’, as defined by Edward Said in his last book, in the work of recent and contemporary Irish poets Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. It explores the anachronistic and untimely as productive ways of thinking about the critical function of art in the three poets, who are all preoccupied with what means to have come ‘too late’ to history, and to poetry. The essay explores the extent to which ‘late style’ can be understood as a function of the ‘exiled’ relationship between the artist and his audience, and to what extent it is a historical consequence of late modernity.

This chapter discusses literary representations of the ‘peripheral’ city, highlighting depictions of the urban landscape as dreamlike and anachronistic in modernist and proto-modernist texts. From Dostoevsky to Machado, Kafka to Joyce, the clash between imperial and Westernising discourses, on the one hand, and the perceived incompleteness of urban modernity at the periphery of Western Europe, on the other, played a key role in the critical and experimental urban aesthetics that emerged from the late nineteenth century. Chronicling literary responses to the complex modernity on display at the margins of European culture, the chapter builds towards a theory of modernism at the urban semi-periphery – or metrocolonial modernism.

This chapter highlights the formative impact of colonial urbanism on the ‘high’ modernist aesthetics of the 1920s, focusing on the role of Dublin in the work of James Joyce. In Dublin, imperial ideals of unity, equalisation and harmony were inscribed onto the architectural landscape and crystallised in early twentieth-century British philanthropic discourses. This chapter focuses on the Empire Day movement, whose organisers aimed to inspire pride and participation in colonial subjects through a day-long urban celebration. While this event attempted to synchronise time across the empire’s cities, as part of an early Commonwealth imaginary, Joyce’s ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode from Ulysses confronts readers with experiences of dissonance and asynchronism, just as the temporality of the episode itself resists readerly synchronisation.

Many of the canonical subjects of pre-modern art were tales of aggression, conflict, combat, and destructiveness; remembrances and forewarnings of disasters worldly and otherworldly; visions of wounding and dismemberment; parables of suffering, abjection, and pain. Yet medieval Christian thought and behaviour, which everywhere registered the ambivalent nature of violence, contemplated all these things in the absence of an encompassing definition of violence as a category of experience. Rather than strive anachronistically for an inclusive “iconography of violence” or map the correspondences between representations and realities, this contribution locates the significant of visual violence in its effects, in the rhetorical force of description, and in the unseen cognitive violences works of art could precipitate when they impressed the “sensitive soul” of the beholder. Beginning with a critique of the idea that violence comprises a coherent subject within European art, this chapter analyses images of warfare and the special challenge of the pre-modern battle piece; the sculpted imagery of violent struggle and predation in the famous Romanesque trumeau at Souillac's monastery church; ekphrastic and visual descriptions of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents; and the rhetorical elaboration of the Passion story's violence in the work of late medieval panel painters.