What is a Classic in History? The Making of a Historical Canon, written by Jaume Aurell

Historians often refer to certain books by their predecessors -Jacob Burckhardt's study of the Renaissance for instance -as 'classics' , but rarely pause to explain either what they mean or on what criteria their choices are based, if indeed they are aware of these criteria.Professor Jaume Aurell, who is best known for his studies of medieval Spain and of the autobiographies of historians, has had the happy idea of problematizing and exploring the notion of a classic in history.In the course of his exploration, stimulated by his 'concern with the increasing divorce between scholars of history and general audiences' , Aurell moves with ease between historical periods, from ancient Greece to the present, while confining himself to the West (the names of Sima Qian and Ibn Khaldun, for instance, are absent from this study).With equal ease, Aurell draws on other disciplines, notably philosophy, literature and, more rarely, sociology.The names of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Frank Kermode and of course, Hayden White, are among those that recur most frequently in these pages.The book focuses on five concepts: 'durability, classic, canon, genre and genealogy' .In a short review I shall focus on the first three of these concepts, which are central to the investigation, at the expense of the other two, which, however interesting in themselves, are somewhat marginal to the main theme of this study.First comes durability.We often say that a 'classic' study is one that has 'passed the test' of time, continuing to be appreciated long after it has been written.What makes some histories durable?Aurell's examples begin with Herodotus and end with Carlo Ginzburg, while Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall receives the lion's share of attention.The example of Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms (1976) raises a major problem.How long is 'durable'?The author does not answer this question, but it seems reasonable to suggest what might be called a 'fifty-year rule' according to which we can only know whether a given work is a classic if it is still regarded as such half a century or more after its publication.That would include, for instance, Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), which recently celebrated its 50th birthday with a conference at Oxford, but not Ginzburg's Cheese (which is 48 years old as I write) together with the late Natalie Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), which is only 41.I admire these two books, view them as exemplary for my own generation and hope that they will both be regarded as classics by future