Distance and historical representation

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 57, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 123-141

  Phillips, Mark Salber ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 41149120628     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: 14774569     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/57.1.123     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. Mark Phillips, The Memoir of Marco Parenti; a Life in Medici Florence, Princeton, 1987.
2. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: the Promised Land of Error (1976), transl. Barbara Bray, London, 1978;
3. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Midwife's Tale: the Life of Martha Ballard, based on her Diary 1785-1812, New York, 1990.
4. I have discussed the disparate forms of microhistory and the ways in which the multiple distances I am outlining here can help to clarify their different commitments in 'Histories, Micro-and Literary: Problems of Genre and Distance', New Literary History 34, 2003.
5. Ginzburg's fullest exposition of this idea is in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, transl. John and Anne Tedeschi, Baltimore, 1989.
6. His recent study, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, transl. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper, New York, 2001, offers a series of stimulating essays concerned with distance, but in a rather different sense from that pursued here.
7. For a helpful overview of this shift in recent history of science, see Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science, Cambridge, 1998.
8. Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, Princeton, 1985.
9. Richard Whately, Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte, ed. Ralph S. Pomero, California, 1985, pp. 24-5.
10. Hayden V. White, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe, Baltimore and London, 1974.
11. See Bernard Williams's remark: 'it must be said that the fantastical elaboration of the scheme and its ability to process almost any possibility without much resistance do sometimes make it seem less like a machine than a picture of a machine'. Truth and Truthfulness: an Essay in Genealogy, Princeton, 2002, p. 243.
12. E. P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class, London (1963), Harmondsworth, 1968, p. 13.
13. For a larger treatment of this tension, see my essay 'Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography', Proceedings of the Modern Languages Association 118, 2003: pp. 436-9.
14. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, 1757;
15. Henry Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, London, 1779.
16. Jules Michelet, Le Peuple, 1846, introduction: 'Let it be my part in the future not to have attained, but marked, the aim of history, to have called it by a name that nobody had given it. Thierry called it narration, and M. Guizot analysis. I have named it resurrection and this name will remain. '
17. See Fritz Stern, Varieties of History, New York, 1973, p. 117.
18. Miscellaneous Essays vol. 1, p. 310. The essay, a review of Hallam, was first published in Edinburgh Review in September 1828.
19. At a time when readers were increasingly drawn to the evocative side of historical writing, literary history in its various forms offered perhaps the most promising vehicle for exploring the sentiments and experiences of ordinary people in the past. See my: 'Literary History and Literary Historicism in the Historical Thought of the Long Eighteenth Century', in New Directions in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. C. Wall, Oxford, forthcoming.
20. This influence was especially pronounced in North America, where the idealist approach was strongly reinforced by Fritz Stern's Varieties of History.
21. Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: the National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, Middletown, CT, revised edn, 1983, pp. 4-5.
22. Robin George Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946), revised edn, ed. Jan van der Dussen, Oxford, 1994, p. 213.
23. Dilthey, Selected Writings, ed. H. P. Rickman, Cambridge, 1976, p. 172.
24. Dilthey, Selected Writings, p. 172.
25. Dilthey, Selected Writings, p. 172.
26. Dilthey, Selected Writings, pp. 181-2.
27. Dilthey, Selected Writings, p. 182.
28. Collingwood, Idea, p. 282.
29. Collingwood, Idea, p. 252.
30. Collingwood, Idea, pp. 257-8.
31. Collingwood, Idea, pp. 229-30.
32. Collingwood, Idea, pp. 29-30.
33. Collingwood, Idea, pp. 38-9.
34. Collingwood, Idea, pp. 42-3.
35. 'The real cause of this restriction of interest to the modern period was that with their narrow conception of reason they had no sympathy for, and therefore no insight into, what from their point of view were non-rational periods of human history; they only began to be interested in history at the point where it began to be the history of a modern spirit akin to their own'. Idea, p. 78.
36. Collingwood, Idea, pp. 76-7.
37. Compare Dilthey's judgement on the Enlightenment: 'No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant; it is only the diluted juice of reason, a mere process of thought': Selected Works, p. 162.
38. Collingwood himself eloquently describes the kind of failure of sympathy that, in my own view, he himself commits. Whenever a historian finds certain historical matters unintelligible, he writes, he has come up against a limitation in his own mind. 'Certain historians, sometimes whole generations of historians, find in certain periods of history nothing intelligible, and call them dark ages; but such phrases tell us nothing about those ages themselves, though they tell us a great deal about the persons who use them namely that they are unable to re-think the thoughts which were fundamental to their life'. pp. 218-19.
39. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874), transl. Peter Preuss, Indianapolis, 1980, p. 8.
40. Nietzsche, Advantage, p. 47.
41. Nietzsche, Advantage, p. 14.
42. Nietzsche, Advantage, p. 10.
43. Nietzsche, Advantage, p. 45.