Showing papers on "Intellectual history published in 2003"

Making Sense of New Labour

Abstract: This book makes sense of New Labour by interpreting its ideas and practices as symptoms of the times in which we live. Making Sense of New Labour is an in-depth study, interpreting a wide range of material, including party political broadcasts and other election material, Tony Blair's speeches, and internal policy discussion. Finlayson disentangles and analyses the different elements of New Labour's political philosophy, which he argues is in large part a reflection of the culture and politics of contemporary capitalism. As such the party inevitably finds itself managing a status quo rather than driving genuine change. The book considers: - Labour's marketing strategy and susceptibility to consumer culture - the rhetoric and practice of modernisation - the place of the Third Way in the context of recent British political and intellectual history - the meaning of the 'knowledge economy' and significance of welfare-to-work - Labour's conception, and management, of the state Alan Finlayson is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Wales Swansea.

A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic

Abstract: The intellectual history of race, one of the most pernicious and enduring ideas in American history, has remained segregated into studies of black or white traditions. Bruce Dain breaks this separatist pattern with an integrated account of the emergence of modern racial consciousness in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. "A Hideous Monster of the Mind" reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism but also countertheories that were early expressions of cultural relativism, cultural pluralism and latter-day Afrocentrism. From 1800 to 1830 in particular, race took on a new reality as Americans, black and white, reacted to postrevolutionary disillusionment, the events of the Haitian Revolution, the rise of cotton cutlure, and the entrenchment of slavery. Dain examines not only major white figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Sd<"@tanhope Smith, but also the first self-consciously "black" African-American writers. These various thinkers transformed late-18th-century European environmentalist "natural history" into race theories that combined culture and biology and set the terms for later controversies over slavery and abolition. In those debates, the ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been largely forgotten, like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith. Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human difference. In retrieving neglected African-American thinkers, reestablishing the European intellectual background to American racial theory, and demonstrating the deep confusion "race" caused for thinkers black and white, "A Hideous Monster of the Mind" offers an engaging and enlightening new perspective on modern American racial thought.

Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology

Abstract: Zammito, John H. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 576 pp. $68.00 hardcover; $29.00 paperback. In this prequel to his The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment, Zammito offers a compelling account of one of the most significant divergences in eighteenth century German thought: the breach between Kant and his student Herder over the relation of philosophy to "anthropology," or the study of human nature. He presents the intellectual biographies of Kant and Herder as two trajectories which converged from roughly 1762-1767 and then diverged, sharply dividing the intellectual world then and subsequently. Zammito argues that the personal acquaintance between Kant and Herder coincided with a distinctive and underappreciated phase in Kant's career. In the early 1760s, Kant rejected the rationalist philosophy of the Wolffian tradition, in favor of the empiricism of the British philosophers and Rousseau. At the same time, he developed misgivings about the established role of a university professor as too isolated from the needs of an emerging German cultured class. He accordingly refashioned himself for a brief time as a Popularphilosophe. In this persona, Kant offered his students, including Herder, new intellectual vistas arising from empirical philosophy, including an anthropological study of the human mind and of history and culture. However, by 1768 Kant had begun to see new possibilities for a rigorous philosophy founded on rationalist principles, and to react against any signs of facile dilettantism in philosophy. During this new dogmatic turn, he offered a lukewarm response to Herder's early writings, thereby initiating a lifelong intellectual and personal breach between them. By the early 1770s, when Herder was reconceiving philosophy as an anthropological discipline, Kant was pursuing his own interest in anthropology as an empirical and pragmatic sideline, especially by developing a new course in anthropology at the University of Konigsberg: a survival of his ambitions as a popular philosopher, but rigorously separated from his philosophical work. In spite of its considerable strengths as a work of biography and intellectual history, Zammito's study deals only superficially with the main philosophical issue in the later divergence between Kant and Herder: the relationship of anthropology to philosophy, or more precisely of Herder's "hermeneutic historicism" to Kant's critical philosophy. …

Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire

Abstract: Worldly Provincialism introduces readers to the intellectual history that drove the emergence of German anthropology Drawing on the most recent work on the history of the discipline, the contributors rethink the historical and cultural connections between German anthropology, colonialism, and race By showing that German intellectual traditions differed markedly from those of Western Europe, they challenge the prevalent assumption that Europeans abroad shared a common cultural code and behaved similarly toward non-Europeans The eloquent and well-informed essays in this volume demonstrate that early German anthropology was fueled by more than a simple colonialist drive Rather, a wide range of intellectual history shaped the Germans' rich and multifarious interest in the cultures, religions, physiognomy, physiology, and history of non-Europeans, and gave rise to their desire to connect with the wider world Furthermore, this volume calls for a more nuanced understanding of Germany's standing in postcolonial studies In contrast to the prevailing view of German imperialism as a direct precursor to Nazi atrocities, this volume proposes a key insight that goes to the heart of German historiography: There is no clear trajectory to be drawn from the complex ideologies of imperial anthropology to the race science embraced by the Nazis Instead of relying on a nineteenth-century explanation for twentieth-century crimes, this volume ultimately illuminates German ethnology and anthropology as local phenomena, best approached in terms of their own worldly provincialism H Glenn Penny is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Missouri, Kansas City Matti Bunzl Assistant Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Refiguring History: New Thoughts On an Old Discipline

Abstract: In this engaging sequel to Rethinking History, Keith Jenkins argues for a re-figuration of historical study. At the core of his survey lies the realization that objective and disinterested histories as well as historical 'truth' are unachievable. The past and questions about the nature of history remain interminably open to new and disobedient approaches. Jenkins reassesses conventional history in a bold fashion. His committed and radical study presents new ways of 'thinking history', a new methodology and philosophy and their impact on historical practice. This volume is written for students and teachers of history, illuminating and changing the core of their discipline.

Business History Around the World

Abstract: Acknowledgments List of contributors 1. Introduction Franco Amatori and Geoffrey Jones Part I. General Issues, Open Questions, Controversies: 2. Identity and the boundaries of business history: an essay on consensus and creativity Louis Galambos 3. Understanding innovative enterprise: toward the integration of economic theory and business history William Lazonick 4. Productive alternatives: flexibility, governance, and strategic choice in industrial history Jonathan Zeitlin Part II. Area Patterns: 5. Business history in the United States at the end of the twentieth century William J. Hausman 6. British and Dutch business history Geoffrey Jones and Keetie E. Sluyterman 7. Scandinavian business history at the end of the 1990s: its prior development, present situation, and future Hakan Lindgren 8. Business history in German-speaking states at the end of the century, achievements and gaps Harm G. Schroter 9. Business history in France Youssef Cassis 10. Business history in Italy at the turn of the century Franco Amatori and Giorgio Bigatti 11. Business history in Spain Albert Carreras, Xavier Tafunell, and Eugenio Torres 12. Business history in Greece: the state of the art and future prospects Margarita Dritsas 13. The state of business history in Japan: cross-national comparisons and international relations Akira Kudo 14. Chinese business history: its development, present situation, and future direction Chi-Kong Lai 15. Business history in Latin America: issues and debates Maria Ines Barbero Part III. Comparative Business History: 16. Family firms in comparative perspectives Andrea Colli and Mary B. Rose 17. Multinationals Geoffrey Jones 18. Business-government relations: beyond performance issues Mathias Kipping 19. The opportunities for business history at the beginning of the twenty-first century Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Index.

American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures

Abstract: The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of colour in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, 'the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust.' This book explores the means by which the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early Black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions. While shedding fresh light on the pioneering figures of African-American and Native American cultural history-including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant-this work also explores a powerful set of little-known Black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals, and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how eighteenth-century Black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion. American Lazarus offers a bold new vision of a foundational moment in American literature. It reveals the depth of early Black and Indian intellectual history and reassesses the political, literary, and cultural powers of religion in America.

The New History

Abstract: The notion of 'history' has always been one strenuously debated by both academics and the wider population. This deeply provocative re-thinking of our engagement with the past by one of the world's leading post-modern historians takes that debate one step further. Alun Munslow re-assesses history in the light of post-modernism and other intellectual challenges which have questioned the primacy of the modernist epistemology of empiricism. In an original and stimulating vision of history that will intrigue all those seriously interested in the subject, Munslow argues that history is not only about the sources, but a literary construction. Munslow concludes that history, as a cultural narrative about the past can never tell us what the past really means. This far reaching conclusion is based on the radical idea that the content of history is defined as much by the nature of the language used to represent and interpret that content as it is by research into the sources. This suggests that history does not produce the most likely meaning of the past but rather can only generate alternative meanings. The lead volume in a major new series on historical thinking and practice, this is an accessible yet absorbing study that breaks new ground in discussing the stage history is at now, and perhaps most engagingly, the direction it will take in the future.

Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History

Abstract: Foreword by Ghada Talhami PART ONE THEMATIC SECTION Introduction: Major Themes of the Book 1. The Scope and Limitation of Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History 2. Contemporary Arab Intellectual Trends 3. Secularism and its Hazards: The Recent Debate in the Arab World 4. Contemporary Arab Views of Secularism 5. Formation of Contemporary Identities: Nationalism and Islamism in Contemporary Arab Thought 6. Traditional Values, Social Change and the Contemporary Arab Personality 7. Globalization: A Contemporary Islamic Response? 8. Contemporary Arab View of Globalization PART TWO THINKERS' SECTION 1. Rashid Ghannoushi [of Tunisia] and the Questions of Shari'ah and Civil Society 2. Muslim Self-Criticism in Contemporary Arab Thought: The Case of Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali (1916-1996) 3. Islam and Muslims in Crisis 4. Toward a Critical Arab Reason: The Contributions of Muhammad 'Abid al-Jabiri 5. Critical Arab Reason 6. Costantine Zurayk and the Search for Arab Nationalism 7. Mahdi 'Amil and the Unfinished Project of Arab Marxism 8. Abdallah Laroui: From Objective Marxism to Liberal Etatism Conclusions Bibliography Index

Strategic Alliances as Social Facts: Business, Biotechnology, and Intellectual History

Abstract: How can we explain a proliferation of alliances when the probability of failure is higher than success? And why have we emphasized their order, manageability and predictability whilst acknowledging that they tend to be experienced as messy, politically charged and unpredictable? Mark de Rond, in this provocative book, sets out to address such paradoxes. Based on in-depth case studies of three major biotechnology alliances, he suggests that we need theories to explain idiosyncracy as well as social order. He argues that such theories must allow for social conduct to be active and self-directed but simultaneously inert and constrained, thus permitting voluntarism, determinism, and serendipity alike to explain causation in alliance life. The book offers a highly original combination of insights from social theory and intellectual history with more mainstream strategic management and organizations literature. It is a refreshing and thought-provoking analysis that will appeal to practitioner and academic researcher alike.

Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860

Abstract: In this history of intellectual life, Michael O'Brien analyzes the lives and works of antebellum Southern thinkers and in so doing reintegrates the South into the larger tradition of American and European intellectual history. O'Brien finds that the evolution of Southern intellectual life paralleled and modified developments across the Atlantic by moving from a late Enlightenment sensibility to Romanticism and, lastly, to an early form of realism. Volume 1 describes the social underpinnings of the Southern intellect by examining patterns of travel and migration; the formation of ideas on race, gender, ethnicity, locality, and class; and the structures of discourse, expressed in manuscripts and print culture. In Volume 2, O'Brien looks at the genres that became characteristic of Southern thought. Throughout, he pays careful attention to the many individuals who fashioned the Southern mind, including John C. Calhoun, Louisa McCord, James Henley Thornwell, and George Fitzhugh. Placing the South in the larger tradition of American and European intellectual history while recovering the contributions of numerous influential thinkers and writers, O'Brien's masterwork demonstrates the sophistication and complexity of Southern intellectual life before 1860.

Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography

Abstract: Since the time of Herodotus, historians have debated the role that myth should play in history. Most have sided with Thucydides, who denounced myth as "unscientific". Joseph Mali, on the other hand, argues that the task of modern historiography is to illuminate, not eliminate, historical myths by showing how they have passed into and shaped historical reality. Mali uses the concept of "mythistory" to steer a course between and beyond older views that confined history to "what really happened" and new, postmodern theories that reduce it to what people have merely imagined to have happened. In a tour de force of intellectual history, Mali traces mythistory from the ancient world to the modern, showing, for instance, how Vico and Michelet sought to recover a deeper and truer myth from uncertain history. He pays special attention to Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Ernst Kantorowicz and Walter Benjamin. Their work, Mali argues, shows us a different way of imagining the past, acknowledging the crucial role that myth plays in the construction of histories of personal and communal identity.

Handbook of Historical Sociology

Abstract: What is important in historical sociology? What are the main routes of development in the subject? This Handbook consists of 26 chapters on historical sociology. It is divided into three parts. Part One is devoted to Foundations and covers Marx, Weber, evolutionary and functionalist approaches, the Annales School, Elias, Nelson and Eisenstadt. Part Two moves on to consider major approaches, such as modernization approaches, late Marxist approaches, historical geography, institutional approaches, cultural history, intellectual history, postcolonial and genealogical approaches. The third part is devoted to the major substantive themes in historical sociology ranging from state formation, nationalism, social movements, classes, patriarchy, architecture, religion and moral regulation to problems of periodization and East-West divisions. Each part includes an introduction that summarizes and contextualizes chapters. A general introduction to the volume outlines the current situation of historical sociology after the cultural turn in the social sciences. It argues that historical sociology is deeply divided between explanatory `sociological' approaches and more empirical and interpretative `historical' approaches. Systematic and informative the book offers readers the most complete and authoritative guide to historical sociology.

Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History

Abstract: From the Publisher: The vast social apparatus of the computer network has aligned people with technology in unprecedented ways. The intimacy of the human-computer interface has made it impossible to distinguish technology from the social and cultural business of being human. Cyberculture is the broader name given to this process of becoming through technological means. This book shows that cyberculture has been a long time coming. In Prefiguring Cyberculture, media critics and theorists, philosophers, and historians of science explore the antecedents of such aspects of contemporary technological culture as the Internet, the World Wide Web, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, virtual reality, and the cyborg. The contributors examine key texts that anticipate cybercultural practice and theory, including Plato's "Simile of the Cave"; the Renaissance Ars Memoria; Descartes's Meditations (on the mind-body split); Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Alan Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence; Philip K. Dick's Man, Android, and Machine; William Gibson's Neuromancer; and Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future. In the final section, a number of cyberculture artists explore how cybercultural themes have been taken up and critiqued in the electronic arts. This book is not for sale in Australia and New Zealand

Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500-1625

Abstract: Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. The moral philosophy of Tudor colonisation 3. The moral philosophy of Jacobean colonisation 4. Rhetoric - 'not the words, but the acts' 5. Law and history 6. The Machiavellian argument for colonial possession 7. Conclusion Bibliography Index.

The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860-1930

Abstract: The image of upper-class women chaining themselves to the rails of 10 Downing Street, smashing windows of public buildings, and going on hunger strikes in the cause of "votes for women" have become visually synonomous with the British suffragette movement over the past century. Their story has become lore among feminists, in effect separating women's fight for voting rights from contemporary issues in British political history and disconnecting their militancy from other forms of political militancy in Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Mayhall examines the strategies that suffragettes employed to challenge the definitions of citizenship in Britain. She examines the resistance origins within liberal political tradition, its emergence during Britain's involvement in the South African War, and its enactment as spectacle. Enlarging the study of the militant campaign for suffrage, Mayhall analyzes not only its implications for the social history of gender but also, and more importantly, its connections to British political and intellectual history. This book is already being touted as a critical revisionist work in the history of suffrage in Britain.

Theory and History in International Relations

Abstract: Theory and History in International Relations is an eloquent plea to scholars of global politics to turn away from the "manufacture" of data and return to a systematic study of history as a basic for theory. While the modest use of empiricism will always be important, Puchala rejects the logical positivism of the so-called "scientific revolution" in the field in favor of a more complex, even intuitive, vision of global politics. He addresses the potential uses of history in studying some of the major debates of our time-the Cold War as a struggle between empires, the collision of civilizations, cultural encounters and colonies in the ancient world, and liberal approaches to the understanding of history and ethical contributions to the dialogue over theory.

Microhistory and the Post-Modern Challenge

Abstract: One fact many of us would rather not acknowledge is that historians, like other people, are shaped by fashion.1 We prefer to understand ourselves to be above the passing fancies of intellectual life and actually standing for a more enduring perspective on our subjects. But we live in the world, and in the academic world at that. Historians may be slower to take up the latest intellectual fashions than scholars in literary studies, anthropology, sociology, and political science. But take them up we do, sometimes so belatedly as to earn scornful condescension from our colleagues in sister disciplines.In the past twenty years this has been especially true of our efforts to assimilate post-modern theory and the works of Foucault, Derrida, and Bakhtin. But the same might also be said of our embrace of Habermas's theorizing on civil society and Geertz's practice of "thick description" and his emphasis on "local knowledge."2 This is not surprising, nor should we be too apologetic about our somewhat lagging, awkward embrace of theories, sometimes after they have turned overripe in their original disciplines. Many of us, after all, have been trained in an unselfconscious variant of British empiricism; and indeed we may have been drawn to study history precisely because American historians, in contrast to scholars of literature, sociology, and anthropology, have often been wary of theoretical discourse and debate.For myself, as a participant observer who has witnessed the rise and decline of a number of such fashions over five decades, from the consensus national narrative of the 1950s, to modernization theory in the 1960s, to neo-positivist quantification in the 1970s, to the approaches just mentioned and the "return to narrative," I am impressed by the way that a part of a fashion-an outlook, a caution, a reaction, an approach-is usually assimilated by many of us so as to exert lasting influence on our thinking, even though the fashion itself fades from active consciousness. So, I expect, it will be with microhistory-my own passion of the moment, and perhaps my culminating historical passion. What follows will be an examination of why, with so many persuasive and respected alternatives, I have become a convert to microhistory, and an evangelical one at that.Let me begin by de-constructing the remarks of one of the foremost scholars of the early republic, Henry Adams, who, by the time he had reached his late fifties, was so deeply skeptical of historians' pretensions to factual accuracy and objectivity that he may fairly be called an early post-modernist.3 Like later post-modernists, he recognized that for all its posturing as "scientific," historical writing is finally a subjective, imagined construction. In 1896 he declared that "the field of knowledge which is called History," was in reality "chaotic and unintelligible . . . a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson."4 Inevitably, he believed, historians were always more or less "inaccurate" and even the best scholars "must always stand in terror of the blunders which no precaution and no anxiety for truth" can prevent. "Error" and "confusion," he claimed, are so pervasive and cumulative, that distortion is not the exception but the rule. Facts are so elusive, their initial creation so subjective, their subsequent survival so accidental, and their selection and organization by historians so constrained by the politics or predilections of author and audience, as to make history writing little more than invention or, as Adams put it, "an inextricable mess."5Though it is tempting to dismiss the observations of our profoundly skeptical predecessor as "cynical and jaded," that would be a mistake.6 Like the post-modernism of our own day, whose influence, Robert Berkhofer tells us, is receding in discipline after discipline with the rise of the "New Historicism," we should not place Adams on the "ash heap of history."7 To do so would be to dismiss his and the post-modernists profoundly important and persuasive insights. …

Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan

Abstract: Late Tokugawa society and the crisis of community -- Before the Kojikiden: the divine age narrative in Tokugawa Japan -- Motoori Norinaga: discovering Japan -- Ueda Akinari: history and community -- Fujitani Mitsue: the poetics off community -- Tachibana Moribe: cosmology and community -- National literature, intellectual history, and the new Kokugaku -- Imagined Japan(s).

The Los Angeles School of Urbanism: An Intellectual History

Abstract: Los Angeles, or more precisely, the Southern California region, has many claims on our attention, but until recently it has been regarded as an exception to the rules governing American urban development. Since the mid-1980s, a remarkable outpouring of scholarship has given birth to a "Los Angeles School" of urbanism. This essay outlines the intellectual history of the LA School, explains the distinctiveness of its break with previous traditions (especially those of the Chicago School), and advocates the need for a comparative urban analysis that utilizes Los Angeles not as a new urban "paradigm," but as one of many exemplars of contemporary urban process.

The Confucian Quest for Order: The Origin and Formation of the Political Thought of Xun Zi

Abstract: Xun Zi, one of the principal thinkers of the pre-imperial period and as such still widely read, ought to appear on any reading list on Chinese intellectual history. Dr. Sato's volume deals with the origin and formation of Xun Zi's political thought, with close focus on the intellectual activity of the Jixia Academy and its impact on this synthesizer's theory on rituals and social norms.

Cultural History/Social History: Some Reflections on a Continuing Dialogue

Abstract: Beginning in the late 1970s, social history was criticized for its tendency to privilege "normal" behavior, its overdependence on static structures, and on categorizing individuals in preset groups. In replacing social history as the dominant new prospective on the past, cultural historians tried to address some of the serious questions raised about the methods of social historians while they adopted the new subjects that social historians had brought into the field. In their revised strategies, cultural historians brought back into awareness issues relating to the contingent, the personal, and the eccentric. At the same time, in swinging away from the vigorous research methods and forms of disciplined inquiry that had become the hallmarks of social historians, cultural historians frequently fell into a variety of problems that have now become quite visible in the field. By urging that the close alliance between cultural and social history be refreshed, Paula Fass suggests ways in which contemporary cultural historians can strengthen their research and writing by learning from the methods and strategies of social history.

The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective

Abstract: The Logic of History reveals the rational basis for historians' descriptions, interpretations and explanations of past events. C. Behan McCullagh defends the practice of history as more reliable than has recently been acknowledged. Historians, he argues, make their accounts of the past as fair as they can and avoid misleading their readers. He explains and discusses postmodern criticisms of history, providing students and teachers of history with a renewed validation of their practice. McCullagh takes the history debate to a new stage with bold replies to the major questions historians face today.

Spinoza's Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine

Abstract: "Spinoza's Modernity" is a major, original work of intellectual history that reassesses the philosophical project of Baruch Spinoza, uncovers his influence on later thinkers, and demonstrates how that crucial influence on Moses Mendelssohn, G. E. Lessing, and Heinrich Heine shaped the development of modern critical thought. Excommunicated by his Jewish community, Spinoza was a controversial figure in his lifetime and for centuries afterward. Willi Goetschel shows how Spinoza's philosophy was a direct challenge to the theological and metaphysical assumptions of modern European thought. He locates the driving force of this challenge in Spinoza's Jewishness, which is deeply inscribed in his philosophy and defines the radical nature of his modernity.

Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378-1615)

Abstract: This volume deals with the basic problem of how theologians of all confessions handled ancient, mainly Christian, history in the Reformation era. The author argues that far from being a mere tool of religious controversy, history was used throughout the 16th century to express profound religious and theological convictions and that historians and theologians of different confessions sought to define their religious identity by recourse to a particular historical method. By carefully comparing the types of historical documents produced by Calvinist, Lutheran and Roman Catholic circles, she throws a new light on patristic editions and manuals, the Centuries of Magdeburg, the Ecclesiastical Annals of Caesar Baronius and various collections of New Testament Apocrypha. Much of this material is examined here for the first time. The book substantially revises existing preconceptions about Reformation historiography and view of the past.