From “History in the Comic Mode,” a festschrift for Caroline Walker Bynum

The point of writing history is not…  somehow to cleanse ourselves, as it were, of the taint of the past–the humanist/Reformation/Enlightenment project of exposing the past as past and cordoning it off behind the fence of anachronism.  Rather, it is to allow ourselves still to be touched by the past.

–Bruce Holsinger and Rachel Fulton Brown; via Millinerd