Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Historiography - Coggle Diagram
Historiography
Natalie Zemon Davis
The Task of the Historian
When we tell histories, are these histories merely a product of experiences we've already had?
Is the historian determined by her context?
History repeats itself
Is historical writing just a writing of the self?
Is what we're writing predetermined?
The long story of 'History from Below'
Preoccupation of big-scale political history
Monumental
Heroic history
Marx
Adam Smith and other Enlightenment thinkers of c18th are interested in internal change
Jules Michelet
(c19th)
Concerned with 'the history of those who have suffered, worked, and died without being able to describe their sufferings'
Jacob Burckhardt
(c19th)
Concerned with cultural history of the Italian Renaissance
The
Annales
Schools:
Bloch
and
Febvre
Marc Bloch
and
Lucien Febvre
Bloch,
The Royal Touch
(1824)
The idea that the touch of the king was seen as a cultural manifestation of the king's power
Not aligned with the rise of the modern
Recognised that legitimacy, here, did not involve an archive of letters
Where is the legitimacy of the aristocracy?
Why should we listen to the king at all?
Febvre,
The Problem of Unbelief in Sixteenth-Century France
(1942)
Argues that what makes atheism possible does not exist in c16th
To be named an atheist means to betray God, but not that he does not exist
What is thinkable in a culture?
How does one describe another world in which the concept structuring your own world and thought do not exist?
Colleagues/students in Paris
Both married to female intellectuals
Sociological
Fundamental to their operation as historians
Concerned either geography, chronology, etc
Annales d'Historie Economique et Sociale
A journal
Established in 1929
Tried to take account of everything
Study of centuries over vast spaces
A history from below
Fernand Braudel,
The Mediterranean
Structuralism
The Cultural Turn of Zemon Davis
Part of a school of people frustrated with the strict structuralism of history, ignoring the individual
Natalie Zemon Davis
Jewish woman
Finds herself in Leon, a centre of print and artisans
Interested in politics from a certain vantage point
Studies
Studies objects relevant to popular culture (e.g. poems)
Studies the way knowledge is shared between ordinary men and women
Looks into:
Class formations
History form below
The relations between people
Does not use the word 'class; very often, but regardless focuses on these structures of society (e.g. gender)
E P Thompson and Natalie Zemon Davis
Analyse violence together via letters
Both study the history of mentalities and ideological frameworks
Both are avid readers of the
Annales
school, and both are not particularly fans of the structural analysis
Davis was more interested in the microhistory aspects of the
Annales
school
The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France,
Natalie Zemon Davis, 2000
Analyses the relational structures of gift giving
Revealing of how people are motivated
Identity and Self-fashioning
The Return of Martin Guerre
(1983)
In early modern France, identity is wrapped up in how one tells a story and how memory attaches to such stories
Question of identity, memory, and how does a women tell her story?
What control does she have over it in her own time?
Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France
(1987)
Pardon stories are elaborate stories used by people not writing themselves to make sense of their lives and responses
Women on the Margins
(1995)
Decentres male history/stories
Reflects on the ways that each of these women are marginalised in their own lives are marginalised others
Was this historian determined by her context?
Is historical writing just a writing of the self?
Agency in history
Natalie Zemon Davis, 'Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth Century France
Illustrates a young woman who gave her body away in order to attribute agency and ownership to her own body
'Paris belongs to the king and my body belongs to me'
This kind of agency is not just received, it is chosen
Self-fashioned
Natalie Zemon Davis, 'Writing "the Rites of Violence" and Afterward,
Past and Present
214, 2012
Presents an example of violence and muderous acts as being 'historically and culturally conditioned, not the simple expression of timeless demonic forces' in the context of the Holocaust
Agency for the historian
Natalie Zemon Davis illustrates agency in her own historical approach of avoiding the
Annales
school and challenging structuralism in historiography
Microhistory and the Holocaust
Microhistory
Microhistory
Karl Appuhn, 'Microhistory'
'Emerged primarily in Italy in 1970s-1980s as a revolt against studies of large social groups and gradual historical transformations'
'Microhistory is a historical practice that takes as its object of study, the interactions of individuals and small groups with the goal of isolating ideas, beliefs, practices, and actions that would otherwise remain unknown by means of more conventional historical strategies'
A fine-tuned dissection of one place or a specific event or a person's life
Relies on close reading and analysis
Dynamic interactions between micro and macro histories
Reclaiming lived experiences
Methods
Psychology, sociology, and anthropology often intersect with historical study when looking into specific sources
Memory studies
Trauma studies
Zemon Davis
does not ignore the understanding/nature of the more general facets
E.g. of rural life in c16th France, in
The Return of Martin Guerre
Questions of Approach
Rooted in culture anthropology
With close observation of individuals within a social context
Holocaust and Comparative Genocide Historiography