The present volume tries to do justice to the variety of self-representational strategies in the art and literature of the late medieval and early modern period by focusing on both the traditional con texts of self-definition (such as courts, schools and religious institutions) and the more innovative contexts of humanist art and literature. The essays collected in this volume represent some of the scholarly approaches to historical testimonies of self-representation and self-fashioning, and hence deal with the literary, artistic, philosophical and theological conceptions of the self. They are preceded by a more general essay indexing the ways in which self-representational texts, ego-documents and self-testimonies should be defined.

Historical interest is rooted in a quest for identity. The histories of tribes, communities and nations help to define their selfhood, and hence their pasts are inevitably modelled on an implicit program stating the use that an author, a ruler or a community wants to make of real or imagined history. History thus becomes a malleable concept accommodating the requirements of self-definition of individuals, or of social and ethnic groups. It also furnishes the fictional props of the ideologies of states and nascent states that are in need of national mythologies to boost their self-esteem. Under the general title Building the Past the various ends and purposes of historical reconstruction and invention in the late medieval and early modern period are examined in this volume by scholars from various specialised fields. Their contributions are grouped in two sections, Rediscovery of the Past and Construction of National Myths.

Fore mote than three decades the problem of the transition from medieval to early modern time has been an important issue of debate for various disciplines within cultural history. The essays in this collection will explore the historical developments in these epochs, focusing on the relation between tradition and innovation on three levels: (1) perceptions of the world and changing geographical boundaries; (2) literary activity in the social environment of towns and humanist circles; and (3) new modes of interpretation and representation in intellectual history.