Rethinking Anachronistic Histories: A Reflection on Time
The second Oxford Centre for Intellectual History Graduate Conference took place on June 5 2025, with the theme of ‘Anachronism in History.’ The panel on ‘time’ invited students to consider the relationship between concepts and uses of time in historical writing.
The theme of anachronism does not often attract sustained attention in intellectual history. At first glance, it is simply a familiar scholarly pitfall: the accidental insertion of modern categories into older contexts, a misstep budding historians are trained to catch and correct. Yet, as the papers presented at this year’s CIH Graduate Conference demonstrated, anachronism is more than a technical flaw. It is embedded in the very ways intellectual history is constructed, contested, and transmitted. Indeed, if we remain attentive to how it operates, anachronism can illuminate the tensions that arise when past and present meet on uncertain terms. This year’s conference focused on how we, as historians, can understand anachronism through the related themes of time, power, and tradition. This reflection brings together insights from the conference’s first session – time – to consider what anachronism, as both a problem and tool, reveals about how historians handle the past. If the papers presented during the session shared one conviction, it was that anachronism should not be dismissed as mere error. Rather, it could be a sign of the productive friction inherent in historical scholarship: an index of how scholars and historical actors alike negotiate competing ideas – not only of time, but also of legitimacy, and continuity.
As mentioned, the first session of the conference, featuring presentations from Riccardo Brighenti of the Università degli Studi di Milano and Avery Benton of the University of Cambridge, focused on the intersections between anachronism and chronology. Brighenti’s paper offered a vivid entry point by recovering the intellectual tensions that shaped debates about time at the end of the Renaissance. In tracing the work of Alessandro Farra and Strozzi Cicogna, he situated anachronism at the heart of early modern scholarship. Farra and Cicogna, working within the loose boundaries of cabalistic interpretation, set out to defend a literalist biblical timeline yet found themselves relying on a patchwork of non-biblical authorities – from Origen and Plato to Berossus the Chaldean. The irony here was clear: in seeking to stabilise time, they necessarily entangled their arguments with sources whose authority was itself the product of older anachronistic claims.
What was especially striking in Brighenti’s study was the degree to which these writers were aware of the paradox they inhabited. Their method did not merely expose a confusion about dates or genealogies; it demonstrated how early modern intellectuals negotiated inherited frameworks with a sense of historical agency. In doing so, they revealed chronology to be a living practice – part interpretive art, part polemical strategy — that could accommodate inconsistencies if these served the purpose of shaping a usable history.
In contrast, Benton’s paper brought the problem of time forward toward modern political life, examining the peculiar status of anachronism within the civic culture of the contemporary United States. The elevation of men such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as ‘Founding Fathers’ to near-mythic status and the treatment of the US Constitution as a quasi-sacred text, she maintained, created a constitutional culture that was effectively suspended in the eighteenth century. Benton argued that this was not simply an antiquarian attachment but an institutionalised form of anachronism. Reverence for these founding myths, she suggested, produced a political imagination that clings to a nostalgic past at the expense of responsiveness to present realities.
In both cases – Brighenti’s Renaissance chronologies and Benton’s American founding myths — we saw how time is not merely a background to intellectual history but a contested medium through which authority is made to endure. Where Farra and Cicogna reached into the deep past to defend sacred chronology, modern US political culture reanimated its own mythic origins to stabilise national identity. From their papers, we learn then that the historian’s task is not only to locate these anachronisms but also to trace how they operate as intellectual strategies.
What, then, did this conference session teach us about how intellectual historians might engage with anachronism more self-consciously? The lesson that surely emerged was that anachronism is neither a straightforward lapse nor a purely rhetorical strategy. It is, more fundamentally, a symptom of how historical actors and interpreters negotiate continuity and rupture. For intellectual historians, the challenge is not simply to detect anachronism and correct it. Rather, it is to ask how anachronistic moves – both past and present – help construct the traditions, canons, and genealogies we study. Indeed, recognising this does not weaken our commitment to historical accuracy. Instead, it enriches it by illuminating the layers of interpretation through which historical claims acquire meaning and force.
As a concluding note, the conference reminded us all that studying intellectual history is to engage with ideas that never sit still in their own time. They travel, mutate, and return with new force under new circumstances. Anachronism is one trace of that movement – not merely a fault line but an invitation to think more carefully about how history lives with, and through, its own contradictions.
Bhadrajee Hewage co-convened the Oxford Centre for Intellectual History Graduate Conference 2025. He recently completed his DPhil in History at Trinity College.
