How useful? 99Contemporary history and past history
Who reads architectural history? And why? In his 1912– 13
essay ‘History and Chronicle’, the Italian philosopher Bene-
detto Croce describes three levels of historical investment in
the past: contemporary history (or true history), past history
(or chronicle) and philology (or erudition).^5 Contemporary
history tells a story that resonates with the present; it reaches
forwards from the past and claims its relevance for the world
of the now. This history recalls the past’s lessons, and can
go so far as to construct them. This is the kind of history
that reminds us that things today are not vastly different from
how they have ever been, that our world is the same as the
world of the past. It is invoked in Burckhardt’s aphorism that
history ‘is on every occasion the record of what one age fi nds
worthy of note in another’.^6
This relationship between present and past can be both
benign and sinister. We might experience the past as an echo
in a doorway or as a voice of authority transcending time.
This contemporary history informs the historicism of all
manner of cultural practices – artistic, religious, political –
which look to history as more than an archive of things that
have happened. Such a history is ‘true’ for Croce because it
is the most worthy kind of history. It reaches down to the
core of what he called our ‘spirituality’, connecting the
present with its origins. When architectural history is con-
temporary in the sense he intended, it is a dimension of
architecture’s contemporaneity, its actuality.
In contrast, past history is separated from present-day life
and (for Croce) man’s spiritual existence. It is the history that
L. P. Hartley called ‘a foreign country’.^7 Whereas Croce’s
‘true’ history has a purpose in the present, ‘chronicle’ is
far removed from contemporary concerns. Croce explains:
‘History is living chronicle, chronicle is dead history; history
is contemporary history, chronicle is past history; history is
principally an act of thought, chronicle is an act of will. Every
history becomes chronicle when it is no longer thought, but
only recorded in abstract words, which were once upon a
time concrete and expressive.’^8
This division of history from the past is not a matter of
temporal but of ‘spiritual’ proximity, literally concerning the