Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
2021
This is the first book on the genesis, impact and reception of the most-widely read History of England of the early 18th century: Paul Rapin Thoyras' Histoire d'Angleterre (1724-27). The Histoire and complementary works (Extraits des Actes de Rymer, 1710-1724; Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys, 1717) gave practical expression to theorizations of history against Pyrrhonian postulations by foregrounding an empirical form of history-writing. Rapin's unprecedented standards of historiographical accuracy triggered both politically-informed reinterpretations of the Histoire in partisan newspapers and a multitude of adaptations that catered to an ever-growing number of readers. Despite a long-standing assessment as a "standard Whig historian", Rapin fashioned the impartial persona of a judge-historian, in compliance with the expectations of the Republic of Letters. His personal trajectory illuminates how scholars pursued trustworthy knowledge and how they reconsidered the boundaries of their community in the face of the booming printing industry and the interconnected growth of general readership. Rapin's oeuvre provided significant raw material for Voltaire's and Hume's Enlightenment historiographical narratives. A comparative foray into their respective different approaches to history and authorship cautions us against assuming a direct transition from the Republic of Letters into an Enlightenment Republic of Letters. To study the diffusion and the impact of Rapin's works is to understand that empirical history-writing, defined by its commitment to erudition in the service of impartiality, coexisted with the histoire philosophique.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
This is a working paper. I would be grateful for any feedback and comment. As agreed with the University of Kent, it can be freely removed from the site in case of a full publication.
Submitted: August 2016 at the Marthin-Luther-Universität, Halle S. Awaiting for evaluation reports.
2017, F. Dendena (a cura di), Nella breccia del tempo,
Come la narrazione del passato fa della storia uno spazio per l’azione collettiva?
The article studies the practices of David Hume in historical writing, compared to those of his major counterparts (Voltaire and Ferguson). Free indirect speech blurs the boundaries between genuine quotations and commentaries, a phenomenon generally ascribed to fiction only.
2019, History of Political Thought
This article examines Tory principles in the eighteenth century by focusing on that party's arguments in the debates about the frequency of elections in 1716, when the duration of parliaments in Britain was extended from three to seven years. The Septennial Act (1716) was an epochal event and a crucial stage in the fortification of the Hanoverian regime and the supremacy of the Whigs in the eighteenth century. When protesting against this Act in the Lords and Commons, Tories resorted to arguments about the ancient constitution and fundamental law -- ideas which have more often been associated with Whiggism. In addition to its historical significance, the episode serves as a case study demonstrating the importance of studying the history of political thought together with political history.
2015, The Historical Review/La Revue Historique
2012, Oxford History of Historical Writing, Volume 3: 1400-1800
Survey of English and Scottish historical writing from the late Middle Ages to the Early Eighteenth Century
2018, Global Intellectual History
An update to the global bibliography first posted on academia in mid July 2016. Additions (many pre-dating the original 2011 cut-off date and those published more recently) are signified by double asterisks ** for those who wish simply to search for additions to last year's posting.
2003, Journal of The History of Ideas
2019, Annales historiques de la Révolution française
The establishment of the republic in France was a world-shattering event that introduced a heretofore unknown break into the political order: after the United States, France became a republic, and in the Three Kingdoms the English, Scottish and Irish reformers regained hope that a democracy was possible. The historiography concerning Ireland at this precise moment of upheavals has for a long time held that the reformers were moderate constitutionalists, and that the Irish Catholics were under-politicized. In contrast with these assertions, a thorough re-examination of the available sources enables to propose another narrative of this pivotal moment between the fall of the French royalty and the beginning of the French Wars: the cosmopolitism that lies at the heart of the republican project – the “Atlantic Republic” – is a direct threat to the political and imperial British order, and perhaps more importantly republicanism becomes the impetus for an insurrection of all the discontents in Ireland.
Locke in his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), defi ned the “law of opinion” as “approbation or dislike, praise or blame, which, by a secret and tacit consent, establishes itself in the several societies, tribes and clubs of men in the world”. In his study of 1962 (Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit), Habermas specifi cally excludes the “law of opinion” from the public sphere contrasting it with the proper defi nition of public opinion. This paper will fi rstly identify the sources and characteristics of Lockean opinion and try to understand the reasons behind the rejection of the latter by Habermas. Secondly, in light of this obliterated category of public opinion, a tentative analysis of various aspects of the historiographical reviews of the Habermasian paradigm is presented and the impasse, criticisms and possible alternatives are identifi ed. By examining the motives for this impasse, this study will take part in the recent debate on whether the Habermasian model has been surpassed.
History
Conferencia presentada en Transitions to Modernity Colloquium. The MacMillan Center, Yale University, 2008. Versión en español disponible en sección Papers
2015, Models of the History of Philosophy
The book is available on line in open access at https://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/book/10.1484/M.ADARG-EB.5.117384
2018, Between God and the King: The World of Military Orders. Proceedings of the VII International Conference on Military Orders, Palmela, 14-18 October 2015 (Isabel Cristina Fernandes ed.), Palmela GESOS, pp. 109–37.
A detailed analysis of the prohibition of one of the Order of St John’s most renowned histories, based on original sources in France and Italy.
This article deals with various aspects of Caio Prado Jr.’s elaboration of historical temporalities. It focuses on Prado’s dialogue with the French historian Fernand Braudel in the 1930s and the 1940s. Our purpose is to highlight coincidences between Prado and Braudel’s understandings of temporality and how those understandings may have been mutually influential. We suggest possibilities for further analysis of this intellectual exchange, using personal documents such as correspondence from the Private Archive of Caio Prado Jr. (IEB-USP). This article approaches Braudel and Prado’s thought in a transnational perspective between France and Brazil, shedding new light on two intellectuals dear to Intellectual History and the History of Historiography.
2017, European Journal of Turkish Studies
The present article undertakes an interrogation of the genealogy of the Turkish cultural area. Challenging some readings influenced by subsequent institutional and disciplinary boundaries, I propose to focus on the period preceding the first institutionalizations in order to capture the process of intellectual autonomization of the field of Turcology and to point out the role that early-European sinologists played in the identification and delimitation of a Central Asian Turkish world. This account is intended to contribute to recent attempts to historicize the study of Orientalist knowledge production, informed by a socio-cultural approach to knowledge, allowing us to grasp the dynamics relating to the connections and circulations in the global context of the early modern era. The question is one of an open and complex process – marked by constraints and possibilities – that can only be understood by means of close and subtle contextualized analysis.
A version of this bibliography was originally compiled for the author’s article on “Historiography”, in volume 1 of the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. M.C. Horowitz (2005). It has been revised and more than doubled in length since then, but even so is still a “select” bibliography. The bibliography lists ethnohistorical works not commonly included in bibliographies of historiography. The emphasis is on works on English but select works in other languages, especially German, French and Italian have also been included for those wishing to follow up topics in further detail; however the reader should note that for every foreign language work listed many more have been left out. With some exceptions, individual chapters within edited volumes of essays are not listed separately unless specifically cited in the text. Conversely, where less than three chapters from an edited volume have been used, they are listed individually but there is no separate listing of the volume as a whole. Editions of primary texts are included much more selectively, either where they have been directly quoted from (for example in the longer extracts that this book features), or where they contain useful introductory or editorial matter commenting on author and text. Most such texts are listed in the footnotes at the point at which they are cited in the present work. In the case of edited collections of essays or sources with more than three editors, only the first name is listed for the sake of space. In the case of journals, typically only volume number and year will be given, not issue number within a year, though in certain exceptions (for instance, special theme issues) the number is sometimes included. NOTE: THIS BIBLIOGRAPHY WAS CLOSED EXCEPT FOR MINOR ADDITIONS IN 2010.
2019, Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits
How we think of the relationship between the Jesuits and the Enlightenment largely depends on how we conceptualize the latter. This chapter addresses it as a series of debates conducted in the context of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters and a number of specific cultural practices that made that very Republic possible. The Jesuits were, therefore, participants in, rather than enemies of, the Enlightenment. Because they combined theological conservatism with cultural modernity, the Jesuits were feared and resented with particular vehemence. Placed between two different modernities, one characterized by global structures of communication and learning, as well as by the practices of cultural accommodation, the other by the attack on superstition and religious authority, the Jesuits helped create the conditions for the Enlightenment, making important but paradoxical contributions to some of its central debates. Nowhere was it more obvious than in the impact of missionary ethnographies concerning the "Gentile" pagan peoples of the world.
HISTORIOGRAPHY S ince very early times, human beings have had some sense of the past, both their own and that of their community or people. This is something that has distinguished us from other species. Having said that, historiography in the narrower sense of " intentional attempts to recover knowledge of and represent in writing true descriptions or narratives of past events " has had a rather briefer career throughout the world, though one more complex and variegated than most accounts allow. It is not possible in the space of a brief essay such as this to convey the entire richness of the human effort to recapture the past, but an effort must be made to summarize the historio-graphical traditions of many different regions. At least three major (in terms of their international scope, longevity, and influence) and a variety of minor independent traditions of historical thought and writing can be identified. The major ones are the Western (descended jointly from the classical Greek and Roman and, via the Old Testament, from the Hebraic), the Islamic (originating in the seventh century C.E.), and the Chi-nese. Minor ones include the various indigenous traditions of thinking about the past (not all of which involved writing), including ancient Indian, precolonial Latin American, African, and those arising in certain parts of east and Southeast Asia. The Western form (which would include modern Marxist Chinese writing) has predominated for a century or more in most of the world, but it would be a mistake to see that as either inevitable or as based on an innate intellectual superiority of method. Its hegemony springs much more from the great influence of Western colonial powers in various parts of the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and perhaps even more from the profound effect in the last hundred years of Western, and especially North American, cultural, linguistic, and economic influences. A consequence of the global dominance of Western academic historical practices is that not just history, but historiography, has been " written by the victors. " None of the major histories of historical writing produced in the last century addresses other historiographical traditions, undoubtedly in part owing to linguistic difficulties. This has produced a thoroughly decontextual-ized and celebratory grand narrative of the rise of modern method that has only been challenged in recent years. It is thus critical that any new survey of historical writing not only pay serious attention to non-Western types of historical writing (and indeed to nonliterary ways in which the past was recorded and transmitted), but that it also steer clear of assuming that these were simply inferior forms awaiting the enlightenment of modern European-American methodology.
2019, In: Andrea Schatz ed., Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture (Leiden etc.: Brill, 2019) 42-61
This round table discusses a collection that explores the circulation of ideas across and beyond the Mediterranean in the long nineteenth century, a space normally consigned to the margins of historiographical concerns and studied in discrete geographical areas. The commentators agree that the diasporic approach centred on biography taken by the collection demonstrates the existence of a plurality of liberal strands and political projects, highlights the importance of exchanges between European peripheries like Russia, the Adriatic and Greece, and challenges the notion of the derivative nature of eastern and oriental political culture. At the same time, the round table suggests new paths for future research, pointing to the desirability of producing a transnational conceptual history of liberalism that connects and compares East and West, and of applying the same transnational methodological approach to other seas.
2022
The Routledge Handbook of Translation History presents the first comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this multi-faceted disciplinary area and serves both as an introduction to carrying out research into translation and interpreting history and as a key point of reference for some of its main theoretical and methodological issues, interdisciplinary approaches, and research themes. The Handbook brings together 30 eminent international scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, offering examples of the most innovative research while representing a wide range of approaches, themes, and cultural contexts. The Handbook is divided into four sections: the first looks at some key methodological and theoretical approaches; the second examines some of the key research areas that have developed an interdisciplinary dialogue with translation history; the third looks at translation history from the perspective of specific cultural and religious perspectives; and the fourth offers a selection of case studies on some of the key topics to have emerged in translation and interpreting history over the past 20 years.
ISECS International Congress on the Enlightenment, Edinburgh, July 14–19, 2019.
2019, Journal of Early Modern History
This article recovers the transnational historical approach of the eighteenth-century Piedmontese thinker Carlo Denina (1731-1813) and his Lettres Critiques. The Lettres, which have remained largely overlooked to this day, addressed a number of cultural debates on the epistemology of the Encyclopédie, the art of translation, and European geopolitics, by drawing on a transnational approach to the history of Europe. This article frames Denina’s transnational gaze in the context of early modern concerns over information overload and eighteenth-century ideas of cultural superiority and alterity. The article follows the ways the Lettres Critiques responded to three querelles: Morvilliers’ 1782 rhetorical attack on Spain, German debates on the merits of French culture and the nature of knowledge, and Madrid’s protracted response to William Robertson’s History of America (1777). The article sheds light on an overlooked eighteenth-century vision of transnational history as a solution to embryonic forms nationalism and the politicization of knowledge.
2018, Global Intellectual History
Patrizia Delpiano (University of Turin), "Histoire universelle des Lumières et antiphilosophie entre France, Italie et Espagne", Eva Velasco-Moreno (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid), "William Robertson’s Works in Spain: The National Interpretation of Universal History", Nuria Soriano Muñoz (University of Valencia), "The Spanish Enlightenment Historiography and the History of America: Some Reflections about the Idea of ‘Impartiality’ and the Emergence of National Consciousness"
15th International Congress on the Enlightenment, ISECS (International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies), “Enlightenment Identities / Lumières et identités”, Edinburgh, 14-19 July 2019.
2021, Sceptical Doubt and Disbelief in Modern European Thought: A New Pan-American Dialogue
Abstract: In this chapter, I try to reconstruct the pathway that goes from disbelief to irreligion. Better to say, the pathway that leads from the skeptical premises sketched in Montaigne’s Essais to the atheistic conclusions we find in Meslier’s Mémoire. In the first section, after a brief introduction, I reflect on Montaigne’s writing, paying special attention to the unfinished, discordant, and —above all— implicit character that he gives to his Essais. In the second section, I reconstruct Meslier’s reading strategies, showing how the priest uses those few books that were available to him. In the third and final section, I make a brief comparison between the Essais and the Mémoire. In short, I try to show how different skeptical passages of Montaigne leave us on the verge of disbelief and how they are transformed by Meslier to extract from them irreligious conclusions. My work is located at the intersection of two areas of study that, in recent decades, have begun to change our perception of the history of modern philosophy: skepticism and clandestine. literature.
2019, ISECS 2019: 15th International Congress on the Enlightenment
In parallel to the professionalization process of the Spanish armies under the Bourbon dynasty and its reforms there was an increase of bureaucracy and a growing systematization in the production of new documents, which reflected the relationship between senior officers and lower ranks. Among these files, ranging from service records and letters to petitions and memorials, there is a remarkable set of documentation that has not been studied in depth yet. We are referring to the files produced by female relatives of those soldiers. These sources, preserved to a great extent in the General Archive of Simancas, show how, despite certain widespread prejudices, ordinary women of the eighteenth century would address the authorities directly whenever their family interests were challenged by adverse circumstances, displaying a degree of empowerment superior to what is frequently believed for that time. Two main lines of action can be tracked. One is the protection of the economic stability of the family by demanding overdue payments, the recognition of pensions or compensations, significantly when the men were absent, whether in campaign or deployed far from home. The second is the intercession in favour of a male relative in order to get a promotion, a transfer or the recognition of grades, jobs or titles. Sometimes the goal was to make a son or nephew inherit the position of his father or uncle. After the decease of their husband or father, widows and orphans did their best lobbying to overcome the economic uncertainty of a time when insurance systems were in an embryonic stage. Among these women, we will highlight the outstanding role of those that belonged to lineages of several generations of military. This paper was presented in the 15th International Congress on the Enlightenment within panel 160. Women of Power in the Eighteenth Century: Identity and Representation, chaired by Claire Boulard-Jouslin (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3) and coordinated by Maud Le Guellec (Université de Lille).
In the 1780s, the dispute about the New World entered a new phase. Creole voices redesign the spatial, political and economic matrix of modern thought about race within an Atlantic framework. This article considers the successful commercial enterprise of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, conceived in Scotland, by focusing on the changing eighteenth-century entry on “America”. It examines the intellectual shift of reference from the Scottish Enlightenment of W. Robertson to the antiquarian history advocated by F.X. Clavijero, a Mexican Jesuit, exiled in the Papal States. The new cartography of knowledge endorsed by the Encyclopaedia led to a racial classification associating Scriptures and providential history.
1992, Journal of the History of Ideas
... At the core of a work characterized by a language of tolerance and human sympathy for the Jews is an abiding antipathy for rabbinism and Catholicism. ... On one level, which was not modern at all, Basnage wrote the history of the Jews in order to convert the remnants of the ...
The outbreak of the French Revolution marked the beginning of a new era of international relations. The legacy of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and the emergence of the new revolutionary principle of popular sovereignty forced politicians and intellectuals all across Europe to rethink the political order of the continent and its relations with the Mediterranean Basin. This paper deals with the Euro-Mediterranean visions of two leading figures of the Italian patriotic movement during the so-called republican triennium (1796-99), Matteo Galdi (1765-1821) and Enrico Michele L’Aurora (ca 1760-?). Galdi envisioned the creation of a worldwide federal “republic of mankind,” whereas L’Aurora strongly advocated the creation of a European federation and of a European Congress. Exploring their published and unpublished works, this paper shows how both Galdi and L’Aurora merged Enlightenment cosmopolitanism with the new principle of nationality. The way they tried to combine these two elements reveals how they understood the revolution and the idea of nation themselves.
1992
2013, ELH
This essay examines Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities through the defining historical mode of the nineteenth-century historicism: comparative history. An under-appreciated response to the failure of stadial and progressive accounts to explain the French Revolution, comparative history drew from a range of allied disciplines, including comparative philology, mythology, and anatomy. This investigation tracks comparatist inquiry through a range of nineteenth-century theories of society and nature, and--by addressing the novel’s concern with historiography, secularism, melodrama, alterity, and multiple modernities--locates Dickens’s sensational account of Revolutionary France as a key text in the emergence of comparative history as an independent Victorian discipline.