ABSTRACT
Traditional syntheses of the history of European culture used the concept of reception of the ancient heritage. It served to justify an identity based on a belief in the existence of the cultural canon; the transfer and instilment of the canon in the formation of successive generations was supposed to guarantee that identity. The notion of heritage was in harmony with the “Great Narrative” of European history, which includes consecutive development stages, each characterized by a canonical, contemporary model for discovering antiquity. We can thus speak of the Italian model in the period of the Renaissance, the French model of the Enlightenment era, and, finally, the nineteenth-century German model of practicing Altertumswissenschaften. This approach to the development of European culture led automatically to negative judgments regarding its non-canonical variations, such as the local cultures’ reactions to the proposed readymade model of discovering and assimilating antiquity, which were at variance with the canon.
