1st Edition
Early Modern Genres of History
Bringing together an international group of literary scholars, intellectual historians, and cultural historians, this book discusses history in its various forms, either as texts or images in the early modern period (1500–1800).
Early Modern Genres of History explores different genres and representational modes regarded as history before history became a scientific discipline during the nineteenth century. It does not seek to show how the modern discipline of history as an academic study developed, but rather to examine the ways in which historical texts and images became part of a wider field of early modern knowledge formations. This volume demonstrates how history was connected to the developments in the public sphere, how antiquarian historians used genres in their work, how history evolved and functioned in the visual field, and how historical genres travelled across different contexts. Overall, Early Modern Genres of History reveals how the diversity of historical representations in the early modern period has contributed to the broader foundations of history as it is understood in the twenty-first century.
This volume is of great use to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in early modern Europe and the history of knowledge across both the history and literature disciplines.
Introduction – Early Modern Genres of History
Emil Nicklas Johnsen and Ina Louise Stovner
Part 1: Antiquarian and material negotiations
Chapter 1: Antiquarian poetry and royal performance
Anne Eriksen
Chapter 2: “Compiled from original authors”: On the status of compilers and compilation as historiographical practice in the eighteenth century
Thomas Ewen Daltveit Slettebø
Chapter 3: ‘History from Marble’: Church notes and the rise of epigraphy in early modern England
Angus Vine
Part 2: Visual understandings of history
Chapter 4: History painting and/as genre
Mark Salber Phillips
Chapter 5: Constructing a Moment in History. The Tableau as a Communicational Mode and Genre in the end of the 18th-Century.
Ina Louise Stovner
Part 3: Genres of history and the public sphere
Chapter 6: Royal historiographer without the title: Niels Ditlev Riegels (1755–1802) and the role of historical genres
in the late 18th-century public sphere
Emil Nicklas Johnsen
Chapter 7 : From amusement to study?: Historical genres in the18th-century essay periodical press
Claire Boulard Jouslin
Chapter 8: Court intrigues between public and secret history: some 18th-century Danish solutions
Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen
Part 4: Traveling historical genres
Chapter 9: Historical transfers: Ludwig Albrecht Gebhardi and the transformations of his late eighteenth-century histories of Denmark and Norway
Håkon Evju
Chapter 10: ‘For no other cause than the lack of writers’: Travel knowledge and the preservation of memory
Anne Helness
Chapter 11: Histories from Barbary. Empirical and imperial aspirations in an eighteenth-century history
Svein Atle Skålevåg
Chapter 12: Between Vico and the Virgin: Image and genres of history in Lorenzo Boturini’s Idea de una nueva historia general de América septentrional
John Ødemark
Part 5: Afterword
Afterword: Some reflections on genre in early modern histories.
Daniel Woolf
Biography
Emil Nicklas Johnsen, PhD History of Ideas, University of Oslo (UiO), Norway. Johnsen has published extensively in Nordic intellectual history, with particular interest in historiography and the dynamics of the public sphere. In addition, he has long experience as editor in Arr. Idéhistorisk tidsskrift (Journal of the History of Ideas) and is currently writing the textbook Vestens idéhistorie fra 1800 til i dag. (History of Ideas in the Western World from 1800 until today).
Ina Louise Stovner, PhD Cultural History, University of Oslo (UiO), Norway. Stovner’s research interests include topics within cultural history, understanding of history, and memory studies, and she has special expertise in visual sources 1750 to 1840. She has extensive teaching experience in cultural history and museology at UiO and several years of experience as a member of the editorial team in Tidsskrift for kulturforskning (Journal of Cultural Studies).
