43 - Ancients and Moderns: France

Summary

Histories of literature are inclined to treat the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns as a rather parochial dispute among French lettrés of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, echoed in England in the ‘Battle of the Books’. The personal quarrels and rivalries of that period are however better seen as the local idiom in which long-standing cultural issues were articulated; the apparently surprising virulence it engendered is no doubt an indication that a critical moment had been reached, a moment whose significance is clearer from our own historical vantage point.

The designation of a group of ‘ancient’ texts or writers, whether as bearers of authority or as models, is a widespread cultural phenomenon. Although it necessarily implies a reader or writer whose position in a present moment is defined contrastively with these Ancients, the further step of coining designations for the group of ‘new’ writers is an important one. That step was already taken in antiquity: in Alexandria, the moderns were called neoteroi; Latin writers – among them Cicero – used the Greek word or translated it as novi (or neoterici), although it is important to note that these terms were not used to mark out distinct periods of cultural history. The word modernus – ‘one of the last legacies of late Latin to the modern world’, as Curtius puts it – did not appear until the sixth century.

The antithesis was recast in different ways during the Middle Ages: not only the pagan authors of the past, but Christian texts also (the Bible, the Church Fathers) were called veteres; the terms moderni and neoterici came to be applied to theologians such as Aquinas, or in another context to the nominalist grammarians and logicians.