Cover -- Contents -- Foreword -- Gestation -- Introduction: The Past Defined -- PART ONE: Antiquity -- Flatland -- Pasts Present -- The Herodotean Achievement -- Thucydides and the Refashionings of Linear Time -- Hellenistic Innovations -- PART TWO: Christianity -- Can't Get Here from There -- The Power of Prayer -- Breakthrough to the Now -- The Idea of the Sæculum -- The Sæculum Reconfigured -- Gregory of Tours and the Sæculum -- Back from the Future: Bede and the Figural View of Reality -- PART THREE: Renaissance -- The Living Past -- The Birth of Anachronism -- Petrarch's "Copernican Leap" -- The Commonplace View of the World -- Jean Bodin and the Unity of History -- PART FOUR: Enlightenment -- Presence and Distance -- Biography as a Form of History -- The Politics of History -- The Relations of Truth / The Truth of Relations -- Montesquieu and the Relations of Things -- The Past Emerges -- Epilogue: The Past Historicized -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- X -- Z.