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Books > History > Theory & methods
Between c.250 and c.650, the way the past was seen, recorded and interpreted for a contemporary audience changed fundamentally. Only since the 1970s have the key elements of this historiographical revolution become clear, with the recasting of the period, across both east and west, as 'late antiquity'. Historiography, however, has struggled to find its place in this new scholarly world. No longer is decline and fall the natural explanatory model for cultural and literary developments, but continuity and transformation. In addition, the emergence of 'late antiquity' coincided with a methodological challenge arising from the 'linguistic turn' which impacted on history writing in all eras. This book is focussed on the development of modern understanding of how the ways of seeing and recording the past changed in the course of adjusting to emerging social, religious and cultural developments over the period from c.250 to c.650. Its overriding theme is how modern historiography has adapted over the past half century to engaging with the past between c.250 and c.650. Now, as explained in this book, the newly dominant historiographical genres (chronicles, epitomes, church histories) are seen as the preferred modes of telling the story of the past, rather than being considered rudimentary and naive.
Examination of the striking new style of writing history in the twelfth century, by men such as Gaimar, Wace and Ambroise. The mid-twelfth century saw the sudden appearance of a remarkable group of writers: the "new historians", authors such as Geffrei Gaimar, Benoit de Sainte-Maure, Wace, Jordan Fantosme and Ambroise, who were the earliest historicalwriters to use French. Each had his own style and authorial persona; yet together, despite their considerable differences, they pioneered a common form of historical writing which is quite distinct from the styles of previous vernacular writers. This book studies some of the more characteristic elements of the common style used by the vernacular historians. Their detached and "self-conscious" authorial presentation is particularly notable: it is seen both in the prologues and epilogues to their works, where they present their source materials as reliable, themselves as serious scholars, and their works as worthy of belief, and constantly throughout the text as the historians direct audience response to their work. The author shows how this "historical" style fits into both the vernacular and the Latin literature current in the period: the vernacular historians borrowed elements from both the learnedand the popular traditions to produce their own successful and vigorous hybrid, one which was still producing new shoots as late as the fifteenth century and which was widely copied and imitated by both writers of courtly romanceand by writers of prose history. Dr PETER DAMIAN-GRINT teaches at Brasenose College, Oxford.
This book examines sonic signals as something both heard internally and externally, through imagination, memory and direct response. In doing so it explores how the mind 'makes' sound through experience, as it interprets codes on the written page, and creates an internal leitmotif that then interacts with new sounds made through an aural partnership with the external world, chosen and involuntary exposure to music and sound messages, both friendly and antagonistic to the identity of the self. It creates an argument for sound as an underlying force that links us to the world we inhabit, an essential part of being in the same primal sense as the calls of birds and other inhabitants of a shared earth. Street argues that sound as a poetic force is part of who we are, linked to our visualisation and sense of the world, as idea and presence within us. This incredibly interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to scholars of radio, sound, media and literature as well as philosophy and psychology.
This collection explores the intersections of oral history and environmental history. Oral history offers environmental historians the opportunity to understand the ways people's perceptions, experiences and beliefs about environments change over time. In turn, the insights of environmental history challenge oral historians to think more critically about the ways an active, more-than-human world shapes experiences and people. The integration of these approaches enables us to more fully and critically understand the ways cultural and individual memory and experience shapes human interactions with the more-than-human world, just as it enables us to identify the ways human memory, identity and experience is moulded by the landscapes and environments in which people live and labour. It includes contributions from Australia, India, the UK, Canada and the USA.
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Sources for Studying the Holocaust provides a pathway for readers to engage with questions about what sources can be used to study the Holocaust. For many historians, the challenge has been how to rescue the story from oblivion when oft-used sources for other periods of history introduce even more issues around authenticity and reliability. What can be learned of what transpired in villages and towns numbering several thousand people, when all its Jewish inhabitants were totally obliterated through Nazi action? Who can furnish eyewitness testimony, if all the eyewitnesses were killed? How does one examine written records preserving knowledge of facts or events, where none were kept or survived the onslaught? And what weight do we put upon such resources which did manage to endure the destruction wrought by the Holocaust? Each chapter looks at one of a diverse range of source materials from which scholars have rescued the history, including survivor testimony, diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, photographs, trial documents, artefacts, digital resources, memorials, films, literature, and art. Each chapter shows how different types of records can be utilised as accurate sources for the writing of Holocaust history. Collectively, they highlight the ways in which all material, even the most fragmentary, can be employed to recreate a reliable record of what happened during the Holocaust and show how all sources considered can be employed to find meaning and understanding by exploring a range of sources deeply. This book is a unique analysis of the types of sources that can be used to access the history of Holocaust. It will be of invaluable interest to readers, students, and researchers of the Holocaust.
Sources for Studying the Holocaust provides a pathway for readers to engage with questions about what sources can be used to study the Holocaust. For many historians, the challenge has been how to rescue the story from oblivion when oft-used sources for other periods of history introduce even more issues around authenticity and reliability. What can be learned of what transpired in villages and towns numbering several thousand people, when all its Jewish inhabitants were totally obliterated through Nazi action? Who can furnish eyewitness testimony, if all the eyewitnesses were killed? How does one examine written records preserving knowledge of facts or events, where none were kept or survived the onslaught? And what weight do we put upon such resources which did manage to endure the destruction wrought by the Holocaust? Each chapter looks at one of a diverse range of source materials from which scholars have rescued the history, including survivor testimony, diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, photographs, trial documents, artefacts, digital resources, memorials, films, literature, and art. Each chapter shows how different types of records can be utilised as accurate sources for the writing of Holocaust history. Collectively, they highlight the ways in which all material, even the most fragmentary, can be employed to recreate a reliable record of what happened during the Holocaust and show how all sources considered can be employed to find meaning and understanding by exploring a range of sources deeply. This book is a unique analysis of the types of sources that can be used to access the history of Holocaust. It will be of invaluable interest to readers, students, and researchers of the Holocaust.
This book-along with its companion volume Mary I in Writing: Letters, Literature, and Representations-centers on representations of Queen Mary I in writing, broadly construed, and the process of writing that queen into literature and other textual sources. It spans an equally wide chronological and geographical scope, accounting for the years prior to her accession in July 1553 through the centuries that followed her death in November 1558 and for her reach across England, and into Ireland, Spain, Italy, Russia, and Africa. Its intent is to foreground words and language-written, spoken, and acted out-and, by extension, to draw out matters of and conversations about rhetoric, imagery, methodology, source base, genre, narrative, form, and more. Taken together, these volumes find in England's first crowned queen regnant an incomparable opportunity to ask new questions and seek new answers that deepen our understanding of queenship, the early modern era, and modern popular culture.
This volume brings together eleven case studies that address how the night became visible in the long and global eighteenth century through different mediums and in different geographical contexts. Situated on the eve of the introduction of artificial lighting, the long eighteenth century has much to say about night’s darkness and brilliance. The eighteenth century has been bound up epistemologically with images of light, reason, and order. Night and day, light and darkness, reason and mystery, however, are not necessarily at odds in the eighteenth century. In their analysis of narratives, poetry, urban spaces, music, the visual arts, and geological phenomena, the essays provide various frameworks to examine the representation, treatment, and meaning of the enlightened night. The transnational and multidisciplinary nature of the volume presents a survey of the research currently being done in the field of the long eighteenth-century night. This collection contributes to an ongoing exercise that questions the accepted definitions of the Enlightenment, and by bringing Eighteenth-Century Studies into dialogue with Night Studies, it enriches the critical conversation between these lines of research.
The volume takes a historical approach to examine how biography has been used throughout history. It gives readers a real sense of the history of the relationship between history and biography. Useful for historians and students as it looks at different, emerging Schools of biography in the present day, allowing the complexity of the practice in the present day to be easily understood by the reader. It covers a large range of issues that historians have faced over time when using biography - such as used the problems of evidence, the subject matter, the methodological robustness and inclusiveness of biographical practice, pluralism and non-Western biographical principles and representativeness which allows the reader to get a sense of the wide range of issues that are addressed when thinking about history and biography.
The study of these letters is particularly valuable in highlighting the relationship between society and the intimate life of an individual, but also in underlining the active role that Prisco an individual was able to play / This volume will be of great use to upper-level graduates, postgraduates and experienced scholars interested in microhistory, history of migrations, history of Self, and in the develop of theoretical approaches and methodologies when using letters as sources in inter-disciplinary historical research.
This handbook addresses the methodological problems and theoretical challenges that arise in attempting to understand and represent humour in specific historical contexts across cultural history. It explores problems involved in applying modern theories of humour to historically-distant contexts of humour and points to the importance of recognising the divergent assumptions made by different academic disciplines when approaching the topic. It explores problems of terminology, identification, classification, subjectivity of viewpoint, and the coherence of the object of study. It addresses specific theories, together with the needs of specific historical case-studies, as well as some of the challenges of presenting historical humour to contemporary audiences through translation and curation. In this way, the handbook aims to encourage a fresh exploration of methodological problems involved in studying the various significances both of the history of humour and of humour in history.
This book explores the question of how society has changed with the introduction of private screens. Taking the history of television in Ireland as a case study due to its position at the intersection of British and American media influences, this work argues that, internationally, the transnational nature of television has been obscured by a reliance on institutional historical sources. This has, in turn, muted the diversity of audience experiences in terms of class, gender and geography. By shifting the focus away from the default national lens and instead turning to audience memories as a key source, A Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland defies the notion of a homogenous national television experience and embraces the diverse and transnational nature of watching television. Turning to people's memories of past media, this study ultimately suggests that the arrival of the television in Ireland, and elsewhere, was part of a long-term, incremental change where the domestic and the intimate became increasingly fused with the global.
The book brings together many recent trends in writing history under a common framework: thinking history globally. By thinking history globally, the book explains, applies, and exemplifies the four basic strategies of analysis, the big C's: comparing, connecting, conceptualizing, and contextualizing, using twelve different branches of history.
This book covers a wide range of topics related to honor and shame in European historical societies: history of law and literature, social and ancient history, as well as theoretical contributions on the state of research and the importance of honor and shame in traditional societies. Honor and shame in Western History brings together 14 texts of interdisciplinary scholars from Europe and North America. It covers a wide range of topics related to honor and shame in historical societies. The contributions cover periods of Western history from Greek and Roman times to the nineteenth century and many of them integrate the concept of a "deep history" of honor and shame in social interaction. The book is essential for a broad audience interested in social history and the history of emotions.
This collection focuses on generations of early women historians, seeking to identify the intellectual milieu and professional realities that framed their lives. It moves beyond treating them as simply individuals and looks to the social and intellectual forces that encouraged them to study history and, at the same time, would often limit the reach and define the nature of their study. This collection of essays speaks to female practitioners of history over the past four centuries that published original histories, some within a university setting and some outside. By analysing the values these early women scholars faced, readers can understand the broader social values that led women historians to exist as a unit apart from the career path of their male colleagues.
Postmodernity's Musical Pasts covers topics from classical to popular and neo-traditional musics to concerns of the disciplines of musicology. These provide insights how the progression of time and history can be conceptually understood after 1945. Postmodernity's Musical Pasts relies on an extensive and varied spectrum of topics, from both the centre and the periphery of the musicological canon, that mirror the eclectic and diverse nature of the postwar era itself. The first section, 'Time and the (Post)Modern', investigates how to understand manifestations of the past in musical composition with regard to time, on the one hand, and with regard to genre, style, and idiom, on the other. The second section, 'Manifestations of History', shows how time and history manifest themselves in art music. A third section, 'Receptions of the Past', takes the contrasts and transitional moments of post-1945 practices further by looking at the temporality of reception from different angles. A final part investigates questions of nostalgia and the temporalities of belonging. The volume subverts the understanding of temporality as linear progression of past, present, and future. It offers new avenues of conceptual thinking relevant for those engaged in the study of music history and culture and for the humanities at large.
Genres of Recollection brings to life the social and textual worlds in which the representation of contemporary Greek historical experience has been passionately debated. Building on contemporary research in history and anthropology concerning the social production of the past, this study considers how people who admit they are "not historians"--from a housewife to an award-winning novelist, a farmer to an aristocratic lady of leisure--mediate their personal, family and community histories by compiling archives and writing diverse genres of historical texts. "Re-collecting" the recent Greek past of labor migration, refugee flight, civil war and urbanization is shown to powerfully shape contemporary social relations and political culture, but also to open a captivating field for imagining redemptive futures.
Christopher Hookway has been influential in promoting engagement with pragmatist and naturalist perspectives from classical and contemporary American philosophy. This book reflects on Hookway's work on the American philosophical tradition and its significance for contemporary discussions of the understanding of mind, meaning, knowledge, and value.
Shows how and why history has been made from loss around the world, challenging the oft-received view that history is written by the 'victors', showing readers how diverse the writing of history can be. All students of history have to study historiography, and this volume offers a new lens through which to investigate that historiography as well as forming part of the cannon that students will study in these courses. There are lots of historiography books out there, but few that engage properly with the idea of history written from loss, from exile, from imprisonment as History From Loss does.
Shows how and why history has been made from loss around the world, challenging the oft-received view that history is written by the 'victors', showing readers how diverse the writing of history can be. All students of history have to study historiography, and this volume offers a new lens through which to investigate that historiography as well as forming part of the cannon that students will study in these courses. There are lots of historiography books out there, but few that engage properly with the idea of history written from loss, from exile, from imprisonment as History From Loss does.
Originally published in German, Italian and French these articles have been translated into English for the first time by the author, the former archivist of The Warburg Institute, London. Aby Warburg's research and writings centred on images, their origins and metamorphoses, and their explanations and interpretations.
This book argues that today we live in the culture of the past that delimits our world and configures our potentialities. It explores how the past invades our presents and investigates the affective uses of the past in the increasingly elusive present. Remembering and forgetting are part of everyday life, popular culture, politics, ideologies and mythologies. In the time of the ubiquitous digital media, the ways individuals and collectivities re-presence their pasts and how they think about the present and the future have undergone significant changes. The book focuses on affective micro-archives of the memories of the socialist Yugoslavia and investigates their construction as part of the media archaeological practices. The author further argues that these affective practices present a way to reassemble the historical and relegitimize individual biographies which disintegrated along with the country in 1991.
In Rationalities in History the distinguished historian David d'Avray writes a new comparative history in the spirit of Max Weber. In a strikingly original reassessment of seminal Weberian ideas, d'Avray applies value rationality to the comparative history of religion and the philosophy of law. Integrating theories of rational choice, anthropological reflections on relativism, and the recent philosophy of rationality with Weber's conceptual framework, d'Avray seeks to disengage 'rationalisation' from its enduring association with Western 'modernity'. This mode of analysis is contextualised through the examples of Buddhism, Imperial China and sixteenth-century Catholicism - in the latter case building upon unpublished archival research. This ambitious synthesis of social theory and comparative history will engage social scientists and historians from advanced undergraduate level upwards, stimulating interdisciplinary discourse, and making a significant contribution to the methodology of history. D'Avray explores the potential of this new Weberian analysis further in his companion volume, Medieval Religious Rationalities.
This 1908 book was a ground-breaking guide for historians in the use and interpretation of official documentary sources. Hubert Hall examines the topic under three headings - archives, diplomatics, and palaeography. In the first part he treats the history, classification and analysis of English archives. He argues that the user should take into account what once existed as well as what survives. The second part deals with diplomatics, from Anglo-Saxon to the sixteenth century. He calls for greater critical analysis of the different types of official documents, something lacking in England when compared to European scholarship. The final part introduces the student to palaeography, and the different kinds of handwriting and contractions met with in official documents. While the book makes no claim to be the definitive work on the subject, it raised the profile of a neglected tool of scholarship, and offers a starting point for further research. |
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