Bursting the Limits of Time

"Yes, it is pretty big. Rudwick is an historian of tremendous range and learning and it is all on display in this book. It is a history of the establishment of what he calls ‘geohistory,’ which is a mode of thought, a way of thinking about the earth as something with a history. This mode of thought grew up in the late 18th and early 19th century in Europe. Specifically, Rudwick traces the early history of what we now think of as separate sciences, geology, palaeontology, and the study of so-called ‘deep time’. He sees all these strands as unified in a coherent body of knowledge concerned with the story of the history of the earth, conceived as something that actually does undergo historical change. For us, nowadays, this is not a new idea. We are able to think in evolutionary terms. But at the time Rudwick is studying, the idea of ‘evolution’ wasn’t as precisely articulated, and the very notion that the natural world might undergo that sort of change was truly revolutionary. The controversies over the Dendera Zodiac were part of this shift in our way of thinking about historical time, the age of the earth, and the earth itself as a specifically historical object. For us the book suggested a way of contextualising the debates about the Dendera Zodiac. They occurred within a context where naturalists, palaeontologists and astronomers were all struggling with the same issue, how to think about the natural world as something that changed over time."