Historiography

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.

This collection of essays aims to offer a multi-disciplinary approach to nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship on Jesus and early Christianity which illustrates the width and depth of the questions that critical reflections on the historical Jesus raised in and beyond the field of liberal theology. More precisely it focuses on Jesus scholarship as practiced in various disciplines and fields that engaged with the academic study of religion. On the other hand this volume aims for a comprehensive multi-perspectivist historicization of this scholarship considering the full range of religious cultural racial political and national dynamics that hosted the many controversies over the historical Jesus.Divided into five sections the eleven essays in this book are organized according to guiding themes and a loose chronological structure. The first section revisits the roots of the Forschung in Liberal-Protestant Germany and especially focuses on the maturation of historical-critical consciousness in the work of Reimarus (and his predecessors) Schleiermacher and Strauss. The second section is concerned with the rise of the “oriental Jesus” against the background of the making of the academic non-theological study of religion as a scientific discipline. The third section explores how themes related to the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity were treated among different academic disciplines from the early second half of the nineteenth century onwards. The fourth section explores how the historical Jesus was at the same time further explored by the biblical scholars and theologians who integrated new comparative methods in their research. The fifth section finally highlights the cultural-political appropriations that were made of scholarly writings on Jesus which not rarely constituted the bricks with which radical political movements built their houses.

The Enlightenment has often been used as a fundamental reference point for understanding the evolution of societies. Nevertheless the broad nature of this term hides great inequalities between different historiographical traditions with some countries considered to have ‘ownership’ of this intellectual and cultural current which arose in the eighteenth century while other lands have been considered at best peripheral or at worst have been wholly disregarded. This is particularly true of the Ottoman Empire and of the Balkan states founded in the first decades of the nineteenth century which have often been studied only through their relationship with France Great Britain and German. This however is not sufficient for understanding how these countries entered modernity. The studies gathered in this book seek to question the invention of the National Enlightenment the history of representations of the European Enlightenment and their variations in Balkan space and time and the phenomena of acculturation and rejection that can be identified in the histories of these lands in order to offer new insights into the contradictory aspirations of nations that have often been torn between several different models of society.