The anthology The Long Quarrel: Past and Present in the Eighteenth Century is named after the late seventeenth-century debate surrounding the breakthrough of ideas in history writing. This debate pitched ancients against moderns. The former promoted the superiority of classical antiquity or other lost golden ages, while the latter nursed the idea that perhaps the present exceeded the past and that history developed to stages of a higher quality. As this book shows, the conflict was greater than just the question of whether the past was superior to the present, or the inverse: it affected not only the view on history but also aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and more.

As a book, The Long Quarrel suffers from the same problem as most academic anthologies: there is no red thread. Even though the articles are sorted under themes, these themes are broad and there are no explicit connections between the articles within them. A concluding chapter tying the articles together would have helped, but there is no such chapter in this anthology. The point of gathering these works under one cover, therefore, remains unclear. However, this does not mean that the book is without merit. The articles are generally well-written and proof of substantial academic work. They will certainly be valuable for future eighteenth-century scholars within different fields. It is impossible to comment on all of them, so a few illustrative examples will have to serve.

In “‘Necesse est indiciis monstrare recentibus abdita rerum’: William Hogarth's The Four Times of Day and the Challenge to Past Models in Eighteenth-Century Art,” art historian Friederike Voßkamp analyzes how the eighteenth-century painter William Hogarth both recognized and challenged traditional art tropes. In a series of paintings, called The Four Times of Day (1736), Hogarth seems to be loyal to these tropes, at a first glance. The paintings—Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night—follow the established distinction of the times of day in four thematic works, well grounded in classic Greek philosophy and literature. It is analogous to the four elements, four seasons, etc. Used by Ovid and Virgil, for example, this trope was later adopted by Christianity and was common in Renaissance art. However, when seventeenth-century scholars such as Newton and Locke questioned the notion of a symmetrical world, they also called tropes like the four perfect parts of the day into question.

Hogarth's series is an example of the effect of that development. While the series links the four times of the day with other tetrads, it also ignores established tropes. It is set in a modern, urban environment instead of a pastoral one. Furthermore, it departs from traditional correspondence between tetrads. Traditionally, a morning motif would take place during spring and noon during summer, etc., paralleling the progress of the day with that of the year. Here, Morning is set in winter, while Evening is in summer, and so forth. Similar observations can be made concerning associations with the elements and the ages of man. Hogarth knew his tropes, like a good ancient, but he treated them with the respect of a modern.

An additional, but not less interesting, example is historian Andrew Jainchill's “The Political Thought of Henri de Bollainvilliers Reconsidered.” Jainchill shows how in the late seventeenth century Bollainvilliers used pre-Merovingian Franks to paint the contemporary French absolute monarchy in a negative light. The Franks/French had gone from heathen heroes in a Homeric tradition to corrupt egotists. Bollainvilliers indicated that the Church and clerical privileges were the central reasons for this decline. This allows for interesting comparisons with other countries and contexts. On a general plane, the notion of a glorious or virtuous past, later gradually tainted by external influence, is a common trope in national history writing. More specifically, the Church and the priests were common culprits in Enlightenment-era history writing. However, the connection to the Long Quarrel is weak and comes across as somewhat forced.

To summarize, Jainchill's article illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of The Long Quarrel. Every article is well written and certainly useful for future research, but together they do not form a convincing whole. The value of all the particular parts is, however, strong enough to make it easy to forgive this shortcoming.