For Julius Wellhausen, the German biblical scholar best known for formulating “the documentary hypothesis,” prophecy served as a marker of religious authenticity. He portrays Ezekiel as denigrated, deceitful, and weak – the linchpin in the story of the transformation of ancient Israel from tribal vitality to priestly fossilization. Yet the carefully constructed scholarly story Wellhausen tells about ancient Israel is structured through fanciful Romantic dichotomies; he maligns scribal culture while evoking a nostalgia for an imaginary oral culture. Wellhausen was deeply influenced by the orientalist fantasies of writers like Goethe and Herder; furthermore, their melancholia about European writing culture continues to influence biblical scholarship’s (mis)understanding of prophecy. Moving away from Wellhausen, I ask how we could read Ezekiel’s weakness, specifically through his face-turning prophecies – not as “diminished” gestures of once-powerful mantic acts, but as creative, rhizomatic acts which expand the possibilities of the prophetic genre?

This chapter argues that the relationship between sound and sense is to be historically understood, and that cultural soundscapes emerge from the accrued meaning that historical actors give to items that may have been there since a long time, but were not previously considered as relevant. The specific case to be discussed here is the practice of collecting (and publishing) ballads: as ballads acquired a new cultural meaning, collective popular interest incorporated them as an active element of the contemporary soundscape. Changes in the way of conceptualizing history and development, in perceiving the divide between oral and written culture, political events and a refashioning of the values attributed to ideas of naturalness and simplicity have all been crucial factors in the process of attribution of meaning to ballads. As cultural identity came to be defined by sounds and music, ballads acquired a new meaning and – of course – this process did not leave the genre unharmed: ‘elite minds’ selected and purged the material that was destined to represent marks of Britishness and proceeded towards the ‘civilizi+L10ng’ of ballads.

In the first of two chapters devoted to the ways in which philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment used ‘conjectural’ or ‘stadial’ history to re-think the development of human society, Aaron Garrett examines the epistemic problems which stimulated their enquiries. Confronting questions in legal history which could not be answered on the principles of positive or natural law, the jurist Lord Kames had recourse first to human nature then to contextual historical developments (such as the rise of commerce) to enable him to bridge gaps in the evidence with empirical and explanatory ‘conjectures’. Kames further drew on Hume’s discussion of time as a psychological experience of a succession of ideas, which carried the implication that the times of history might be experienced in multiple forms. This implication is clarified by a comparison with the strictly chronological conception of time adopted by Adam Anderson in his history of commerce, which fitted every development of note into the same unitary Biblical time scheme. The point of stadial history, by contrast, was to compare societies at different levels, or ‘stages’, of development according to their own time schemes. By pluralising time, the Scots made it possible to envisage multiple histories of human origins, religious belief and social development.

James Mill’s dogmatic rhetoric in his essay ‘On Government’ (1820) and his rejection in the History of British India (1817) of ocular and narrowly empirical methods, when seen against the febrile political backdrop of the early 1830s, was a gift to utilitarianism’s Whig, Tory, and Romantic opponents. However, his defence in A Fragment on Mackintosh (1835) of Bentham’s jurisprudence and moral philosophy, when placed in the context of his other late writings, suggests a different intention. In both his historical and political writings, James Mill pursued the ‘real business of philosophy’ in which general principles illuminated social phenomena and laid bare the emptiness of Whig empiricism. Only the ‘speculative man’ could appreciate the past’s distinctness by separating general from special causes, and Mill’s indebtedness to Francis Bacon and David Hume is evident in this respect. His attractions to Benthamite utilitarianism and Scottish philosophical history were variously deepened and underpinned by his readings of Bacon and Hume, and those readings, Barrell suggests, may have been encouraged by Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh.

The British Enlightenment grappled with the concept of “modern history”: what it should contain and what kind of guide to the world it should be. This chapter examines the decline of neoclassical assumptions about history writing in the context of Britain’s rapid social transformation and the emergence of its robust commercial society. A new pressure for historiography to acknowledge this modern world led historians to profound questions about the relation between present and past. How was the eighteenth-century world different from what came before it? When and where did its modernity begin? Asking and answering these questions produced not only new kinds of history writing but also new readers and writers of history. Setting aside the history of great men, new kinds of histories made clear that everyone is a historical actor, opening the door for women and men who would never be statesmen to tell their stories. New histories took many forms, and the chapter’s sections focus on the different answers to questions about the past—and how to represent it-- provided by philosophical history writing, antiquarianism, and the novel.