ABSTRACT
The presence of the past became a widely discussed topic in historical theory in the mid-2000s. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Eelco Runia set the agenda for this debate by sketching a contrast between the direct and unmediated contact with the past and the interpretation of the past mediated by language. The longing for a direct presence of the past is at odds with one of the central premises of historicism: The idea of historical distance, of a deep-rooted difference between past and present. In order to put the post-historicist conception of presence developed by Gumbrecht and Runia into perspective, two pre-modern forms of presence will be discussed: The presumed direct presence of Jesus, Mary, and the saints in Medieval cult images, and the problematic presence of the past in Renaissance historiography. When the past became a radically distant past with the rise of historicism around 1800, a longing for the absent past emerged, which is echoed in the 21st century in Ankersmit’s notion of sublime historical experience. The mirror image of the longing for an absent past is the idea of a haunting past, which can be observed in debates on historical trauma and historical injustice.
