Constructing European Historical Narratives in the Early Modern World - (Reflections on Early Modernity / Réflexions Sur La Première Modernité)

Book Synopsis

This volume showcases the diversity of contributors and voices that intervened and shaped historical narratives in early modern Europe.

Exploring the art of crafting historical narratives during the early modern period, Constructing European Historical Narratives in the Early Modern World reflects on the social and political implications of the diversification of research methods and writing practices associated with historical writing. It does so by considering the global and local situatedness of historical narratives from the perspective of both their makers and publics while interrogating the extent of the hegemony that a composite European world acquired over the elaboration of historical narratives.

The contributions to this volume take into account historical texts ranging from those most concerned with the self--revealing questions of personal or familial agency and identity--to those in which groups of writers collaborated to produce engaged narratives, to those focused on broader, disembodied concepts, such as language development and geographical features, using a significant mixture of textual references and personal experience. This volume deliberately mixes studies from numerous parts of Europe and its colonial outposts and juxtaposes writings by published scholars with the manuscript testimonies of occasional memorialists.

About the Author

Hilary J. Bernstein is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Historical Communities: Cities, Erudition, and National Identity in Early Modern France. Fabien Montcher is associate professor of history at Saint Louis University. He is the director of the SLU Center for Iberian Historical Studies. He is the author of Mercenaries of Knowledge: Vicente Nogueira, the Republic of Letters, and the Making of Late Renaissance Politics. Megan Armstrong is professor of history at McMaster University and presently chair of the department. She is a specialist on religion and politics with a special focus on early modern Catholicism and the Holy Land. She is the author, most recently, of The Holy Land and the Early Modern Reinvention of Catholicism.