Historiography : an Introductory Guide

251 Pages·2012·0.66 MB·English

by  Cheng

Historiography: An Introductory Guide

Historiography
An Introductory Guide
Eileen Ka-May Cheng
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
© Eileen Ka-May Cheng, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without
prior permission from the publishers.
First published 2012
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-4877-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions Ltd, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Art and Science in Renaissance and Early Modern
Historical Writing 4
2 Enlightenment and Philosophical History 29
3 Romantic and Critical History 61
4 Scientific History and Its Challengers 91
5 Social History, Fragmentation, and the Revival of
Narrative 112
6 History and Historiography in Global Perspective 133
Notes 147
Appendix – American and European Historians from the
Renaissance to the Twentieth Century 174
Suggestions for Further Reading 204
Bibliography 211
Index 226
Acknowledgments
I would first like to thank Michael Greenwood for inviting me
to do this project and for his supportive attitude throughout the
writing of the book. I would also like to acknowledge the helpful
suggestions of Daniel Woolf on the initial proposal for the book.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the aid of my research
assistants Caitlin Durham in creating and compiling the table of
historians in the appendix, and J. T. Jamieson in proofreading the
text and checking the appendix.
Eileen Ka-May Cheng
Historiography: An Introductory Guide
Introduction
“What is historiography?” asked the American historian Carl
Becker in 1938. Readers may well ask that question since profes-
sional historians have themselves differed over the meaning of
the term, defining it variously to mean the writing of history,
the study of historical methodology, the analysis of the different
schools of interpretation on a particular historical topic, or the
history of historical writing.1 It is not surprising that many
readers are either unfamiliar with the concept of historiography
altogether, or at best view it as a dry and esoteric subject, of
interest only to specialists, when even historians have often
treated historiography in this way. The English historian G. R.
Elton articulated the view of historiography as a narrow subfield
that is somehow different from “real” historical study when he
declared, “There are times when work on the history of history
must appear distinctly narcissistic, especially when it deals with
ages which did not regard history very highly.”2
The aim of this book is to challenge this view of historiography
– defined to mean the study of the history of historical writing –
by presenting an accessible and concise overview of the history
of historical writing from the Renaissance to the present, focusing
primarily on the United States and Western Europe.3 The book
not only describes the major schools of historical writing and the
different approaches taken by historians from the Renaissance
to the present, but explains the emergence of these approaches
by placing them in the context of their time and showing how
they reflected broader social and cultural developments. Far from
treating historiography as a subject distinct from real history,
then, the approach of this book is based on the assumption
that historical writing is as much a product of its time as any
2 Introduction
other historical development, and can therefore serve as a lens
into major trends and developments in the history of Western
civilization.
By taking this approach, the book also seeks to avoid falling into
the trap that has been all too common, especially in older surveys
of historiography, of presenting the history of historical writing
as a linear progression of improvement from the backward
and simplistic outlook of earlier historians to the more sophis-
ticated and complex perspective of modern scholars, or what
the historian Peter Novick has called a “Whig” interpretation
of historiography.4 Accordingly, while following a chronological
structure, beginning with the Renaissance and ending with the
rise of global history in recent historical scholarship, with each
chapter devoted to a major stage in the development of historical
writing, the book tries as much as possible to analyze its subjects
on their own terms and as the products of their context, rather
than judging them according to modern standards of scholarship.
To better achieve this goal, the book focuses on selected case
studies of individual historians who illustrate important trends
and developments for each chapter. While the individuals chosen
for these case studies were not necessarily the most important or
representative of their time, taken together they show something
of the diversity that characterized historical writing in each of the
periods examined in the book. The book quotes more extensively
from the subjects of these case studies than is often the case with
general surveys of historiography, both as a way of presenting
these historians in their own words – and thus, in some sense, on
their own terms – and to illustrate how to analyze their writings.
Unlike many other general works on historiography, then, the
book does not try to provide a comprehensive overview of the
subject, but instead takes a more conceptual approach aimed
at conveying broad themes and trends to readers.5 The goal of
the book is therefore to give readers a framework for analyzing
historiography, which they can then apply to the study of other
historians not covered in the book.
Introduction 3
To this end, the book includes a listing in the appendix of
some of the most important European and American historians
for each of the eras it covers. Although this listing is necessarily
also selective, it should give readers a starting point for further
research and show them how the individual historians examined
by the book were part of a much larger constellation of thinkers,
demonstrating the diverse range of possibilities available to
historians of different eras. And when we consider this range
of possibilities, and the conflicts they engendered, the sense
of fragmentation that some modern historians have bemoaned
in current historical scholarship appears less new – and less
threatening – than they have feared. And so, what a study of
historiography demonstrates is that far from being a threat to the
integrity and vitality of the discipline, conflict has been a defining
feature of it from the Renaissance to the present, just as it has been
of history itself.
In turn, there can be no better way of challenging the widely
held misperception of history as simply a dry chronicle of facts
and dates than by examining how widely historians have differed
not only in their interpretations of historical events, but in their
very definitions of history. Thus, rather than being something
distinct from “regular” history, historiography can illuminate
an integral aspect of historical analysis – its subjective and inter-
pretive character – and in so doing demonstrate to readers what
makes history such an interesting and complex subject.