Arnaldo Momigliano

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Arnaldo Dante Momigliano KBE (September 5, 1908, Caraglio, Piemont–September 1, 1987, London) was an Italian historian known for his work in historiography, characterized by Donald Kagan as the "world’s leading student of the writing of history in the ancient world".

He became professor of Roman history at the University of Turin in 1936, but as a Jew soon lost his position due to the anti-Jewish Racial Laws (enacted by the Fascist regime in 1938), and moved to England, where he remained. After a time at Oxford University, he went to University College London, where he was professor from 1951 to 1975. Among his students was the Roman historian Tim Cornell, now a professor at the University of Manchester[1]. Momigliano supervised his PhD thesis, and Cornell subsequently went on to become Momigliano's research assistant from 1972-1973. Momigliano visited regularly at the University of Chicago.

In addition to studying the ancient Greek historians and their methods, he also took an interest in modern historians, and wrote a number of studies of them. From the 1930s on, he contributed a number of biographies to the Enciclopedia Italiana, and in the 1940s and 1950s he contributed biographies to the Oxford Classical Dictionary and Encyclopædia Britannica.

In 1974 he was made an honorary Knight of the British Empire (KBE).

A number of his essays were collected into volumes published posthumously.

[edit] Books

(incomplete)

The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (1963)
Studies in Historiography (1966)
The Development of Greek Biography : Four Lectures (1971)
Alien Wisdom : The Limits of Hellenization (1976)
Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (1977)
How to Reconcile Greeks and Trojans (1983)
On Pagans, Jews and Christians (1987)
The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (1991)
A.D. Momigliano : Studies on Modern Scholarship (ed. G.W. Bowersock and T.J. Cornell, 1994)

[edit] Further reading

Bowersock, G. W. "Momigliano's Quest for the Person", History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 4, Beiheft 30: The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano. (Dec., 1991), pp. 27–36.
Christ, Karl. "Arnaldo Momigliano and the History of Historiography", History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 4, Beiheft 30: The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano. (Dec., 1991), pp. 5–12.
Ginzburg, Carlo. "Momigliano and de Martino", History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 4, Beiheft 30: The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano. (Dec., 1991), pp. 37–48.
Kagan, Donald, "Arnaldo Momigliano and the human sources of history", The New Criterion, Vol. 10, No. 7, March 1992.
Murray, Oswyn. "Arnaldo Momigliano, 1908–1987: [Obituary]", The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 77. (1987), pp. xi–xii.
Murray, Oswyn. "Arnaldo Momigliano in England", History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 4, Beiheft 30: The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano. (Dec., 1991), pp. 49–64.
Phillips, Mark Salber. "Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain", Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 57, No. 2. (Apr., 1996), pp. 297–316.
Weinberg, Joanna. "Where Three Civilizations Meet", History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 4, Beiheft 30: The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano. (Dec., 1991), pp. 13–26.