Stanford Seminar - "THE TEXT AND THE ARCHIVE: A WORKSHOP ON THE RECENT HISTORY OF HISTORICAL METHOD". 

Featured Speakers: John Jeffries Martin (Duke University) and Guido Ruggiero (University of Miami)

*Please RSVP by Wednesday, October 19 (end of the day, so we can confirm number of lunches).

Historical knowledge is based on a wide range of sources, but in the twentieth century archival documents tended to gain pre-eminence over other forms of evidence. Recently, however, historians and others, especially students of literature, have begun to rethink the way in which our strategies of reading and interpretation change as we move from archival documents to published texts, whether literary, religious, or philosophical. And this shift is altering the ways current scholars working across disciplines relate to the text and the archive. Indeed, these new ways of seeing texts have also led to debates about how the widely shared ideal of interdisciplinarity might work as historians engage a wider range of texts available in the attempt to garner their full value for our understanding of the past.

This workshop, then, is intended as a conversation across the disciplines. Historians John Martin and Guido Ruggiero will get the ball rolling by briefly outlining what they each see as the most promising methodological innovations in considering texts in Renaissance and early modern studies over their long careers, with particular attention to their own work on the cultural turn, quantitative history, microhistory, global history, the history of gender and sex, and various forms of literary analysis. Participants are invited to join the discussion and share their own perspectives about methods they have found most promising for exploring texts in their many different forms.

John Jeffries Martin, professor and former chair of history at Duke, is a historian of early modern Europe. He is the author of Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (1993), Myths of Renaissance Individualism (2004), and editor or co-editor of several volumes, including Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City State (2002), as well of the series Vices & Virtues for Yale University Press. His most recent book, A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World, places its emphasis on the role of faith – not only within Christianity but also within Judaism and in Islam – in animating individual and collective actions in the early modern world. Indeed, faith did much to shape agency, and played a role in fostering new political, religious, and scientific visions of a more hopeful future. At the same time, many horrors – from civil wars to colonialism -- also stemmed from the “apocalyptic imagination.”