Natural encounters: climate,weather and the Italian Renaissance

This paper examines a key issue in the history of the climate in the pre-instrumental period, that is, how to use narrative sources which make frequent references to weather events, but which need contextualised interpretation. The paper follows an argument that climatological techniques for deriving temperature indices from chronicles, though they have become increasingly elaborate and refined, nevertheless leave out much that is of interest to the social historian. This paper explores the area of the what-is-left-behind when chronicle narratives are reduced to numerical indices. Investigating a broad range of Latin and Italian chronicles from fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italy, the paper draws three main conclusions: that sensitivity to weather events not only varied greatly among writers (as one might expect) but so too did their use of severe weather to serve the purposes of narrative (through sequencing, metaphor and analogy); that sensitivity to meteorological anomaly changed during the period, especially in the fifteenth century with the spread of prognosticating verses; and that the broadening of chroniclers' interests in weather, both ordinary and extraordinary, and in its effects on everyday, material life may allow a connection to and re-evaluation of the Burckhartian idea of the Renaissance ‘discovery of the world’.     

Tracking democracies: Italy and Japan in historical perspective

Abstract

The Italian and Japanese roads toward democracy have been paved by external forces, by the timing of economic development, by ‘great’ leaders and by such factors as institutions, class structure, geography and even by accident. In finding a pair of countries where so much is similar, and yet where fundamental differences penist, comparativists have fertile ground in which to look for key factors in political (and democratic) change. This article, in short, takes aim at illuminating these factors by distinguishing between the structural and cultural conditions within which democratic tracks were laid in Japanese and Italian history. It concludes that a closer examination of leadership and agency is necessary to explain more fully democratic development in Italy and Japan.     

J.G.A. Pocock and the idea of the ‘Cambridge School’ in the history of political thought

This article offers a reinterpretation of the origins and character of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ in the history of political thought by reconstructing the intellectual background to J.G.A. Pocock's 1962 essay ‘The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry’, typically regarded as the first statement of a ‘Cambridge’ approach. I argue that neither linguistic philosophy nor the celebrated work of Peter Laslett exerted a major influence on Pocock's work between 1948 and 1962. Instead, I emphasise the importance of Pocock's interest in the history of historiography and of his doctoral supervisor, Herbert Butterfield. By placing Pocock's intellectual development in these contexts, I suggest, the autonomy of diverse versions of the ‘Cambridge’ approach can more readily be perceived.     

Experimental history: the appeal of postmodemism in historiography

Use, truth and time constitute the basic elements of the epistemological structure of history. That structure went through three stages: pre-modern (from ancient times to the late eighteenth century, before the professionalization of history took place), modern (the period of professional history, from the late eighteenth century to the 1970s), and post modern (post 1970s). In these three stages, use, truth, and time successively occupied the core of the epistemological structure of history. Postmodernist history, which puts time at the core of its epistemology, is an extreme form of historicism. Even more than historicism, it has emphasized the determining effect of time and change on historical truth and historical consciousness. The privatization of historical narrative and reading has prodded history to become experimental. Experimental history no longer proclaims the truth about the past. Instead, under specific historical circumstances, it strives to produce texts that will be recognized by individual historians and provides these texts to readers, who will make their own judgments. Whether these texts are true will be decided through the uses they produce. In this way, any historiographical practice will be an experiment conducted by an historian in the present and that will consist in searching for the truth about the past. The success of this experiment will depend entirely on the experimental environment, that is, on the conditions provided by the reading environment. __________ Translated from: Beijing Shifan Daxue Xuebao 北京师范大学学报 (Journal of Beijing Normal University), Vol. 5, 2004     

近20年来关于远古传说与史学产生关系的研究

远古传说对中国史学的产生具有十分重要的推动作用。近20年来,学术界对这一问题的研究,在综合研究、专题研究、比较研究等方面,都取得了突出成就。但这一课题研究仍存在一些薄弱环节。如远古传说内容对史学产生的重要影响,远古传说的表述形式．其原始历史意识对史学产生的推动作用,远古传说的传播状况,远古传说影响史学产生和发展的方式与途径等,都还有待于作更深入地探讨。     

NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE VANQUISHED STATE: GERMAN AND JAPANESE POSTWAR HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

The defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 required historians in both countries to reevaluate the past to make sense of national catastrophe. Sebastian Conrad's The Quest for the Lost Nation analyzes this process comparatively in the context of allied military occupation and the Cold War to reveal how historians in both countries coped with a discredited national history and gradually salvaged a national identity. He pays special attention to the role of social, discursive, and transnational contexts that shaped this process to highlight the different courses that the politics of the past took in postwar Germany and Japan. The picture that emerges of German and Japanese historiography and the respective attempts to come to terms with the past is at odds with the conventional narrative that usually praises West German historians and society for having come to terms with their dark past, as opposed to postwar Japan, which is usually regarded as having fallen short by comparison. There was in fact far more critical historiographical engagement with the past in Japan than in West Germany in the 1950s. Reasons for the divergent evolution of the politics of the past in Germany and Japan should not be sought in the peculiarities of postwar national history but rather in an entangled transnational context of defeat, occupation, and the Cold War, whose effects played out differently in each country. These conclusions and others reveal some of the opportunities and special challenges of comparative transnational history.     

WRITING THE NATION INTO HISTORY

This article considers the fruits of an elaborate multi‐year European Science Foundation (ESF)‐sponsored research project on the reciprocal dynamics joining nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century historiography to the varying trajectories of European state‐formation. It reads the culminating volume in the eight‐book series sponsored by this ESF project against the wider associated discussions and the larger context of the contemporary historiography of nationalism. It seeks to draw out the defining features of the approach involved (conceptually, methodologically, intellectually, politically), while pointing to a number of the entailments and lacunae. In particular, it considers some of the attenuations and omissions resulting from the adoption of an overly institutional and “top‐down” approach to the chosen thematic of “nation and narration.”     

南北战争期间的黑人士兵心态研究

黑人战士在南北战争中的心态及心路历程经历了一系列变化。作为黑人的代表,他们在战争中体验了加剧的痛苦、伤心、愤怒、绝望、兴奋和成就感,而他们的总体心态是委曲求全,并且使得美国种族歧视在这一历史巨变时刻达到悲剧性高潮和根本转变时刻。     

THE RULES OF THE GAME IN THE STUDY OF ANCIENT HISTORY

“The Rules of the Game,” expounded in ten remarkably bold theses, can easily be read as a synthetic retrospective or introduction to the formidable oeuvre of Arnaldo Momigliano. Indeed, this piece served as the opening chapter to his Introduzione bibliografica alla storia greca fino a Socrate (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975), and its subsequent reprints as an independent essay in several Italian journals and anthologies signal its importance for Momigliano. In this provocative and occasionally brilliantly witty essay, Momigliano sets forth his programmatic views on the ethos of the historian, as well as on the historical method and its applications in the study of ancient history. Here, as elsewhere, Momigliano is interested in detailing the link between ancient documents and their historical interpretations in later millennia. Ancient sources, he cautions, do not capture ancient realities transparently or completely, but are mediated documents whose historical value hinges, within certain limits, on the historian's analytical questions, inflected as they inevitably are by different ideological commitments. For this reason, he places special emphasis on the comparative method, stressing difference rather than similarity, and advises that historians with various areas of expertise collaborate, a point underscored throughout the essay. What is more, the essay contains the salutary reminder that the historian ought to attend not only to the surviving documents but also to the conspicuous silences and lacunae in the evidence.     

ASSESSING (AND NOT ASSESSING) THE ITALIAN CONTRIBUTION TO HISTORIOGRAPHY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

Edited by Giuseppe Galasso, one of Italy's most distinguished historians, this large volume seeks to convey the Italian contribution to historiography and political thought from the dawn of the Middle Ages into the present century, though it is overwhelmingly concentrated on the centuries since 1400. It includes six overview essays, but over 70 percent of its bulk consists of short articles, 108 in all, the vast majority on individual figures, and most of them five to seven pages in length. Whereas the approach, through individual figures, makes the volume especially valuable as a reference work, the approach also entails limitations making it hard to delineate and assess a distinctively Italian contribution. Readers must often connect the dots on their own if they are to discern the strands of a distinctive tradition. In his introductory overview, Galasso suggests a special Italian sensitivity to history, or capacity for the philosophy of history, but the suggestion is left vague and is followed up only in the most ad hoc way in the subsequent essays. The book offers little on how Italian idiosyncrasy might have either compromised or enhanced wider impact. Although the extent of Italian international interaction is well documented, there is little attention to reciprocity and the scope for synergy. Nor is there much assessment of the implications of changes in the valences of that interaction over the centuries, especially in breeding self‐criticism and sometimes compensatory myth‐making that might have further complicated the resonance of Italian offerings. But the volume demonstrates the richness of the Italian contribution and implicitly invites us to better encompass it, perhaps through comparative work and further research on multinational interplay.     

二十世纪中外心理史学概述

本文主要介绍19世纪末至20世纪末西方和中国心理史学发展的基本状况。狄尔泰和李凯尔特是德国批判历史哲学中新康德主义的杰出代表;从费弗尔、布洛赫到布罗代尔,则代表着法国年鉴学派“精神状态史”研究与“长时段”理论有机结合的过程。这期间,弗洛伊德是促使心理史学转变的主要人物。二战后,西方心理史学的中心转移到美国。中国自20世纪20年代开始接受心理史学,朱谦之、何炳松具有译介之功;梁启超最早尝试使用心理史学的方法。六七十年代以后,经殷海光、李泽厚到王富仁、谢天佑等人的不断努力,心理史学真正在中国付诸实践,且渐成气候。至新的世纪之交,心理史学在普及中已形成诸多的研究门类,其中以章开沅提出的“离异与回归”的分析模式最具代表性和影响力。     

De-personifying Collaert's Four Continents: European descriptions of continental diversity, 1585–1625

Adriaen Collaert's personifications of the four continents are typical examples of how continents and their respective cultures were represented in the art and literature of Europe in the early-modern period. For example, Asia is the exotic double to Europe, possessing an ‘otherness’ upon which European identity has been juxtaposed. Such personifications of continents and broader tropes of ‘the other’ and ‘the exotic’ have greatly influenced the historiography of the idea of Europe. However, the creation of art and literature characterised by these tropes reflects only part of the European understanding of the wider world. This article will explore how travellers – such as missionaries, merchants and ambassadors – in Europe's encounters with non-European societies presented a complex picture of the world sought to offer practical guidance and knowledge. How travellers’ accounts and personifications interacted is important for understanding the European experience of other continents. In considering how travellers presented their knowledge of continents, it is possible to analyse both how early-modern Europeans viewed other continents and question how useful artistic representation of ‘other’ continents are for understanding how they viewed their own.     

The history of modern and contemporary Italy: Made in France (from the late 1970s to the late 1990s)

Abstract

Over the past three centuries Italy has been the focus of numerous studies by French historians, who have taken advantage of the great wealth of sources available there. While no new synthesis has yet been achieved, we can identify certain main lines of development in French historiography. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s international relations and, especially, the relations between France and Italy were given the greatest attention, before a new focus on forms of sociability and political pedagogy began to be more common. However, the shifting of focus of historical studies to the centres of political decision making often coincided with less attention being paid to social stratification. Beyond these major themes, some researchers have reconstructed ‘global’ historical models, which have been characteristic of the renewal of post‐war French historiography.     

当代德国史学界国际关系史研究新趋势

近年来,德国史学界的国际关系史研究发生了一系列变化,其研究内容不仅仅包括传统的外交关系,而且也包括国家和非国家行为人跨民族、跨文化的交往。虽然强调文化的重要性的观点只在小范围内得到贯彻,但是对外交官身边的人的研究、对正式外交关系建立之前的前外交活动的研究日益增多。以往有关国家关系研究主要是以欧洲为中心的,现在,欧洲国家同欧洲以外的"异文化边缘共同体"的关系也被列入国际史学研究的日程表了。     

‘Eadem,sed aliter’: Arthur Schopenhauer as a Critic of ‘Progress’

Summary

Scholars have tended to overlook the political import of the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). This is perhaps unsurprising, since Schopenhauer himself was not a political philosopher and wrote relatively little about political matters. But Schopenhauer's near-silence on political topics should warrant our attention: why would a systematic philosopher, who made lasting contributions in metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, devote so little attention to politics? Connecting his political thought with his philosophy of history, I argue that Schopenhauer can best be regarded as a critic of the idea of progress, especially ‘progress’ conceived of as national development or the growth of the state.     

The Study of Chinese Historiography from the Perspective of Intellectual History

To promote historical research today, one needs to create a vigorous environment for historiographic criticism, to summarize the progress and state of all fields and topics of history, and to enhance the study of historiography. All these three aspects, which share similar characteristics, can be called “historiography.” Their essence is the basic method for deepening the study of historiography as a whole and refining its branches from the perspective of intellectual history. They can help us to form a healthy scholarly mechanism to review historical achievements, which would be crucial to the development of academic research. Translated from Nankai Journal (Philosophy, Literature and Social Science Edition), No. 2, 2004     

近年来西方汉学清史研究若干范式

西方汉学界近半个世纪的清代历史研究受到三大理论即现代化理论、全球史观和后现代主义的强烈影响,社会学、人类学和政治学等社会科学的概念方法也影响西方汉学家研究清代历史时的选题和解释路数。西方清史研究先后兴起了五种重要历史编撰范式:现代化理论视野下的晚清史编撰、世界历史与清社会转型研究、以中国为中心的清史、清季国家与社会关系研究、后现代式的清史研究等等。了解西方汉学界的清史研究近年来发展的脉络有助于我们自己的清史研究。