In a short outline, Ranke’s dictum is being used to question a chronological historiography of a positivst nature. Instead, the book suggests a retrospective cautioning against an apologetic writing of Christian origins. None of the authors of the first millennium intended to write history in the modern sense of ’Ranke’, very few of them made use of the canonical New Testament for making historical claims - quite contrary to our modern and contemporary text books. And it is questionable whether they were ever written and collected to produce such modern narratives. Instead, when authors of the first millennium used sources for evidence, they mainly relied on Jewish authors or non-canonical writings that are rather neglected or disregarded and understudied today, despite the continuous rise of research in these over the past decades.

George Grote developed aspects of Bentham’s and James Mill’s philosophy into an endorsement of German Historismus, the fruits of which can be seen in his landmark History of Greece (1846–1856). While his historiography is associated more with James Mill than Bentham, Barrell argues that his conception of philosophical history more closely resembled Bentham’s science historique than James’s scale of civilisations, and that his attraction to German Historismus can be explained, at least partly, by his Benthamite logic; like Bentham, he stressed the past’s particularity and distinctness, in pursuit of which he embraced the hermeneutic, philological, and critical strands of Historismus. Greece’s ‘peculiarity’ provided opportunities for reflection without resorting to a vacuous presentism. His examination in the history of ‘democratical sentiment’ and ‘constitutional morality’ illustrated modern society’s comparative selfishness and the difficulty of reproducing those sentiments ex nihilo. The chapter ends by considering the ways in which J. S. Mill drew on these arguments to reconcile modern individuality with extensive civic duties.

Composers have long engaged with texts, but the extent to which they have consciously constructed a literary cosmos around their work and private lives has radically changed over the last two centuries. For modern composers, it has been increasingly common to read not merely to enrich intellectual horizons or scour for musically settable material, but as a means to tap into a reservoir through which the reception of their music can add a layer of cultural legitimation. Viewed against this wider context, the extensive library that Strauss collected, read, and selectively presented to audiences in various musical formats symbolizes neither the physical legacy of a lifelong bibliophile (Brahms) nor the quiet spiritual refuge of a well-heeled bourgeois (Elgar). Rather, it constitutes the material footprint of an intellectual disposition toward the world that stems from a deeper-held set of beliefs about the cultural mission of literature in Western European history.