Vendor
	Edward Everett Root John Spiers
Original language
English
Categories
History

What is History Really About?

Peter Burke

Reflections On Theory and Practice

This volume gathers Professor Burke's most important essays on the theory and the practice of history. In the first part, the main theme is the way in which concepts borrowed from social and cultural theory may encourage historians to ask new questions about the past or help them to answer old ones.

The second part of the author's work is to illustrate some major new trends in historical practice: the use of images as evidence, for instance, the interest in different attitudes to time, and the increasing awareness of the relation, close or distant, between historians and the past that they study.

Contents:

Introduction.

Section A. Theory.

1. The Art of Re-Interpretation: Michel de Certeau.

2. Performing History: the Importance of Occasions.

3. Translating Knowledge: Translating Cultures.

4. The History and Theory of Reception.

Section B. Practice.

5. Images as Evidence in Seventeenth-Century Europe.

6. Reflections on the Cultural History of Time.

7. The Cultural History of Intellectual Practices: an overview.

8. The Invention of Micro-history

9. A Short History of Distance.

10. Detachment and Involvement in Historical Writing.

11. Exemplarity and Anti-Exemplarity in Early Modern Europe.

12. Historical Discourse in Renaissance Italy.