The Novel as Theory of History: Early Modern French Theories of Historical Writing

2021 ◽  
Vol n° 375 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Neus Rotger
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Theory Of History

The Oxford History of Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Korean Peninsula ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
North West ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400–1400? How was the past understood in religious, social, and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes chapters on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.

The Birth of the National Historical Writing in England and France

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Palamarchuk ◽  
◽  
Ekaterina Terenteva ◽  
Sergey Fyodorov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Complex Analysis ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Prevalent Form ◽  
Xviith Century

The monograph is a study of main trends of emergence and evolution of the national historical writing in Western Europe in the XVIIth century. Based on a complex analysis of several phenomena which defined the development of the Early Modern historical writing, it provides a comparative analysis of the regional schools of historical writing (particularly those of the English antiquaries and French érudits) in the process of their respective growth and formation accomplished by the end of XVIIth century with the advent of the national historiography. The conceptual unity of the book is verified within the context of the rise of the national states in England and France, which stipulated a consistent demand for reinforcing the nationally orientated discourses not only in a historical writing but also in legal and political thought. The perception of England as an empire, entrenched in the insular historical and legal consciousness, recurring during the reigns of the Stuarts and extending to the whole British archipelago, determined the establishment of chorography as a prevalent form characteristic of the English historiography. Chorographic structure of the narrative unfolding the space of the territorial “empire” to the reader corresponded to the method of “intellectual appropriation” of the British Isles by the English antiquarians which could be defined as “cultural-historical”. A considerable role was devoted to reactualization of ethnogenetic myths at different levels: while some of them (primarily – the Galfridian myth) were regarded as relevant to the pan-British cultural and historical past, others emphasized autonomous dimensions of the past and present of distinct composites (Scotland, Ireland, Wales) The continental French variant of proto-national historiography also utilized the idea of empire but in a different mode defined by the formula “rex in regno suo imperator est”. The emerging school of érudits modelled principles of its narratives on patrimonial structures rooted in the feudal medieval society (dynasty; royal family; aristocratic lineages; seigneurial rights and vassal obligations; the system of offices created by the monarch stemming from the royal household etc.). The unity of the subjects of the French kingdom was ensured not by the shared territorial commonality but by their loyalty to the king. Therefore, the French variant of “intellectual appropriation” was developed in a socio-political direction in contrast to the territorial.

scholarly journals Zentrifugen des Wissens – Zur Enzyklopädik des Barockromans

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas B. Kilcher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Centrifugal Dispersion

AbstractEarly modern literature has high epistemological claims. In particular, the novel as the most innovative genre of the 16th and 17th centuries was expected to negotiate and transmit knowledge about the world in an extensive way. This epistemological optimism must be understood against the background of contemporary encyclopaedic models, which offered new possibilities of reaching out for universal and total knowledge. Two variants of encyclopaedic writing are most efficient for the novel: the logic of Lullism and the miscellaneous knowledge production of Polyhistorism. Both techniques were used in baroque novels of the 17th century: Polyhistorism produced a centrifugal dispersion of knowledge throughout the texts, whereas Lullism aimed at recollecting and ordering it. This interplay is evidently present in Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s highly digressive 3,000 page novel „Arminius“ (1689/90), with its paratextual framework of prefaces, annotations, and indices. Moreover, the reception of „Arminius“ in 18th and 19th centuries is pertinent for the subsequent critique of encyclopaedic knowledge.

The Moor and the Novel: Narrating Absence in Early Modern Spain by Mary B. Quinn

MLN ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 560-562
Author(s):  
Javier Irigoyen-García
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Modern Spain

Plus çça change……. Ancient Historians and their Sources

2003 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. BRIAN BOSWORTH
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Forensic Rhetoric

This article addresses the problem of veracity in ancient historiography. It contests some recent views that the criteria of truth in historical writing were comparable to the standards of forensic rhetoric. Against this I contend that the historians of antiquity did follow their sources with commendable fi delity, superimposing a layer of comment but not adding independent material. To illustrate the point I examine the techniques of the Alexander historian, Q. Curtius Rufus, comparing his treatment of events with a range of other sources that reflect the same tradition. The results can be paralleled in early modern historiography, in the dispute between J. G. Droysen and K. W. Krüüger on the character of Callisthenes of Olynthus. Both operate with the same material, but give it different ““spins”” according to their political perspectives. There is error and hyperbole, but no deliberate fiction.

The 2012 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: The Eighteenth-Century Invention of the Renaissance: Lessons from the Uffizi*

2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Findlen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Cabinet Of Curiosities

This essay explores the role that the eighteenth-century Uffizi gallery played in the invention of the Renaissance. Under the Habsburg-Lorraine rulers, and especially during the reign of Grand Duke Peter Leopold (r. 1765–90), changes to the Medici collections and the gallery’s organization transformed an early modern cabinet of curiosities, paintings, and antiquities into a space in which a historical narrative of art, inspired by rereadings of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, became visible in a building he designed. A succession of Uffizi personnel was increasingly preoccupied with how to see renaissance, and more specifically Tuscan rinascita, in the collections. The struggles between the director Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni and his vice-director Luigi Lanzi highlight how different understandings of the Renaissance emerged in dialogue with antiquarianism and medievalism. At the end of the eighteenth century the Uffizi would definitively become a museum of the Renaissance to inspire new forms of historical writing in the age of Michelet and Burckhardt.

Settlers in New Worlds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hodgkins
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Original Poetry ◽  
New World ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Conversion Narrative ◽  
Utopian Literature ◽  
Utopian Fiction ◽  
Poetry Writing ◽  
Interpretive Communities

Early modern colonial survival meant that imaginative writings about settlers in new worlds outnumbered imaginative writings by those settlers; yet new world settlers did leave literary artefacts of their interpretive communities. Writing about new worlds tended to fire the fancy, either in fantastic exploration narratives, fabulous colonial prospecti, reflective essays, or in the more outright fictions of dramatic and utopian literature, and of lyric and epic poetry. Writing in and from new worlds was often more quotidian, with nonfiction prose genres like ships’ logs, company reports, personal letters, spiritual diaries, and sermons predominating with a sprinkling of original poetry, proverb, and song. Old genres were modified, and new ones born, by necessity and invention: not only the traveller’s tale and ‘utopian’ fiction, but also the conquest story, the atrocity exposé, the settlers’ covenant, the captivity and conversion narrative, and the extended Eucharistic meditation and puritan jeremiad—and the novel.

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