Suchergebnisse

On January 6, 1537, Lorenzino de' Medici murdered Alessandro de' Medici, the duke of Florence. This episode is significant in literature and drama, in Florentine history, and in the history of republican thought, because Lorenzino, a classical scholar, fashioned himself after Brutus as a republican tyrant-slayer. Wings for Our Courage offers an epistemological critique of this republican politics, its invisible oppressions, and its power by reorganizing the meaning of Lorenzino's assassination around issues of gender, the body, and political subjectivity. Stephanie H. Jed brings into brilliant conversation figures including the Venetian nun and political theorist Archangela Tarabotti, the French feminist writer Hortense Allart, and others in a study that closely examines the material bases—manuscripts, letters, books, archives, and bodies—of writing as generators of social relations that organize and conserve knowledge in particular political arrangements. In her highly original study Jed reorganizes republicanism in history, providing a new theoretical framework for understanding the work of the scholar and the social structures of archives, libraries, and erudition in which she is inscribed.

This article explores continuities between the antiquarian erudition of humanist historians and Enlightenment philosophical histories, showing that supposedly revolutionary developments in eighteenth-century historiography emerged from an older scholarly tradition. It focuses on the research of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, a learned society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France that went from serving as a propaganda tool for promoting King Louis XIV's absolutist regime to becoming the first modern historical research institute and a cradle of the Enlightenment. The article examines the emergence of what might be called "cultural history" or "the history of culture" (histoire des moeurs, as eighteenth-century authors called it). It analyzes how the academicians studied pagan beliefs and speculated about the functions of ancient myths and cults, thus transforming the views about the origin of religion and its role in society. The article also discusses how the academicians made sense of customs and daily practices and how they understood the causes of the progress and decline of civilizations.

Introduction -- Writing urban history -- Municipal history and urban privileges -- François de Belleforest, national sentiment, and local scholarship -- Origin stories -- Urban history and Capitalité: the rivalry between Clermont and Riom -- Ancient history, sacred history, and French national sentiment -- Genealogical history and local history : André Duchesne and the history of France -- Irreconcilable histories? André Duchesne and the contested history of Reims -- Recent history : remembering the Wars of Religion -- Conclusion: looking back on local history.