Archaic Contamination: Hegel and the History of Dead Matter

This article reads the work of F. W. Maitland, a foundational figure in medieval legal scholarship, as an extended meditation on the theory and practice of writing history. Because Maitlandʹs scholarship not only occupies a central place in two disciplines (law and history) but also negotiates the competing demands of an older, narrative form of historiography and the newer, scientific discourses of sociology and anthropology, his writing illustrates the persistence of certain epistemological and methodological questions. In particular, it reveals a deep interest in the modes through which history is figured. Recognizing that history is epistemologically constructed through and by tropes - metaphor, metonymy, analogy - each with its own conceptual and practical logic, Maitland turns to a notion of metaphoric history to productively sustain the tension between the abstract and the concrete, the whole and the part, that haunts nineteenth-century history writing. (MBN)