Of the past, of the great civilizations that at some point dominated the world just as of those whose names have forever been lost, of all the men who ever lived and loved and dreamed, ultimately, only things remain, or to be precise, only the vestiges of the things that once were theirs. Insofar as we understand history to be an attempt to know the past, these things are the stuff of all history. They are, one could say, the very reality of a past that continues to be with us—as ruins, as works, or simply as things—here in the all-enveloping present. Its materiality is composed of layers of the past, of all those amalgamated pasts that remain with us as a presence. The past is at once present and gone. It continues to be lost even when it has been found again. And it never ceases to haunt the present.

Peter Miller’s History and Its Objects is an attempt to write the history of this uneasy relation with the past. How do we gain access to these vanished worlds through the remains that have been left behind? And what is the genealogy, as it were, of this quest driven by the loss of the past, and which effaces the past even as it makes it accessible to us? How did this quest evolve from the antiquarians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries up until contemporary times? And what has it told us about the fundamental nature of the historical matter constituted by the physical remains of the past, regardless of what those remains are? Peter Miller’s brilliant scholarly essay brings into conversation the approaches of collectors (such as Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, one of the founders of antiquarianism), pioneering museologists (in particular through the foundation of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg), archaeologists (above all R. G. Collingwood), cultural historians (notably Gustav Klemm), and philosophers (foremost among them Friedrich Nietzsche).

The subject is vast. It goes well beyond antiquarianism or art history or even cultural history in general. It is a work that will appeal to a wide audience, in fact to everyone sensitive to the issues raised by the way we remember the past. The depth and breadth of History and Its Objects is sure to make it a historiographical classic of histories of material culture. For this is not simply a work of erudition; it is a profoundly human book, too. Peter Miller is not afraid to share with us how the work took form in the wake of his father’s passing, when the author found himself left with objects that had belonged to his father and that had suddenly become relics of a past both incredibly present and terribly absent. Be we historians, archaeologists, philosophers, or writers, we have surely all experienced this loss of past and felt the Sehnsucht, as Nietzsche called it, which generates remembrance of both the most fictive and the most genuine kind. When I finished reading Peter Miller’s book, I found myself both regretful and hopeful. I regretted that he had not gone further still, that he had not addressed today’s presentist world, which finds us immersed in a total and simultaneous present, haunted by “a past that will not pass.” But I also hoped that his book would inspire others to write along the same lines and continue the dialogue with things from the past—its relics, both humble and grandiose—that History and Its Objects has begun.