Historiography (c. 1501-1800)

This volume is a collection of reflections from leading senior and junior historians regarding the merits of historical comparativism in the field of Iberian history. The first purpose of the book is to encourage a dialogue between scholars of the Iberian Empires and to foster a reconsider how they see the broader history of the early modern world in light of recent historiography. The second aim of the book is to prompt scholars of other regions in global history to consider the recent literature on the Iberian Empires anew to move beyond the tropes of the Black Legend and narrative of growth splendour and decline and to study those imbrications had connected disparate parts of the world and which the postcolonial turn has unearthed. In a series of articles and interviews contributors were encouraged to consider the role of linguistic divides in the growth of historiographical strands and to speak plainly about the possible siloes that have emerged in the field. Contributors discuss the Atlantic turn corporate cultures the Catholic adoption of Protestant ideals gender and race all while drawing on insights from scholars who work on early modern nuns the material history of sugar and coffee or those who are exploring the uses of the concept of barbarity in borderlands.

Dès la fin du xve siècle les monarchies portugaise et espagnole se lancent au grand large dans un élan de construction impériale qui saisit le globe. Une diversité d’acteurs et de savoirs dont la cosmographie et la navigation sont porteurs de ce processus. Ce dernier transforme à jamais l’image et le concept de la Terre comme espace de l’habitat humain retravaillant les liens entre espace et temps. Pilotes et cosmographes contribuent alors à une reconceptualisation des temporalités et des temps de la Terre. Quels textes ont-ils rédigés et lus quels instruments ont-ils manipulés à cette fin ?

En explorant ces dynamiques à partir d’une pluralité de matériaux le livre embarque le lecteur sur des bateaux naviguant vers les Indes l’invite dans des Casas et des entrepôts portuaires ou dans des universités où résonnent les échos d’une mer transformatrice des connaissances. La création de la chaire de cosmographie à la Casa de la contratación (Séville 1552) et la trajectoire de son premier détenteur Jerónimo de Chaves (1523-1574) servent de « laboratoire » privilégié d’où observer ces problématiques.

Le livre élargit ainsi la manière de comprendre la cosmographie au xvie siècle souvent réduite à son rapport à la cartographie à l’intersection de plusieurs pratiques et savoirs (histoire naturelle théologie astrologie astronomie navigation) et au-delà du clivage « Anciens-Modernes ». En embrassant d’un regard les monarchies ibériques l’ouvrage ancre dans l’Europe méridionale la question plus large de la production des techniques et des sciences à l’époque moderne inscrivant l’espace ibérique dans une première globalisation.

Starting from a political reality which is at the same time artistic and cultural the book Ars Hasburgica aims to review the still so common historiographical conception of the Renaissance that conceives this period from a geographically Italocentric artistically classicist and politically centered the idea of "national" arts and schools.

But Renaissance is a more global and complex phenomenon. What this book aims to offer is an idea of the art of that period that considers the role played by the Habsburg dynasty and its various courts in this period trying to verify whether by applying other historiographic models and having the art of the Casa de Austria as a focus traditional ideas can continue to be maintained well into the twenty-first century. We refer to the so-called "Vasari paradigm" on which art history of the sixteenth century has largely been built over the last centuries. It is also intended to structure concepts about the art of the period not so much around nationalist considerations and identities of the arts but to raise these issues throughout ideas such as that of the court as a political artistic and cultural sphere in the wake of the classical studies by Norbert Elias Amedeo Quondam or Carlo Ossola.

Over the centuries historiography - in many different forms - became an important vehicle by which to create articulate and express the existence awareness and characteristics of Europe’s regions. Be it the histories of noble families that were important stakeholders in a region urban histories describing the developing urban networks through which regions could function dynastic histories emphasizing the relationship between ruler and region or hagiographies describing holy men and women and their veneration as focal points within regions - all of them represented and reflected identities within an understood spatial and or mental sphere. Historiography can therefore help us to understand the way in which regions were seen from within and from without and to understand the patterns and dynamics of regional cohesion. Moreover it sheds light on the dialectic between nation and region and on the relationship between the regional sphere and the wider (inter)national sphere.

The authors of this volume look at individual European regions from different points of view using historiography as a lens. They analyse the ways in which history as a construct has played a role in establishing regional identity providing examples of the ways in which recording interpreting and recounting the history of regions through the ages has been instrumental in shaping these regions. The first section of the volume explores regional identity in medieval and early modern historiography; the second shows how in the age of the invention and triumph of the European nation-state (the long nineteenth century) historiography of a new kind was applied for a deliberate creation of regional identity or at least reflected the need for a historical confirmation of identities.

In the recent past critical discussions concerning notions such as ‘cultural area’ and ‘area studies’ - as well as their relativization by means of conceptions that avoid splitting clearly identified areas (inter alia ‘third space’ ‘hybridity’ ‘diaspora’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’) - have drawn attention to the long history of cultural territorialization. This book attempts to open the history of philosophy to reflexive and globalizing tendencies elaborated in the field of ‘world history’. From the seventeenth century onward in both modern Europe and North America historical sciences - notably philosophical historiography and cultural history - colonized both the past (or national pasts) and the ‘rest’ of the world. The contributions gathered in this volume address both phenomena to the extent that they have been linked with modern historicization of philosophy sciences and culture.