Notes and Queries: James DeKoven's Journals (original) (raw)
Related papers
What Is History For? Johann Gustav Droysen and the Functions of Historiography
Berghahn Books, 2014
A scholar of Hellenistic and Prussian history, Droysen developed a historical theory that at the time was unprecedented in range and depth, and which remains to the present day a valuable key for understanding history as both an idea and a professional practice. Arthur Alfaix Assis interprets Droysen’s theoretical project as an attempt to redefine the function of historiography within the context of a rising criticism of exemplar theories of history, and focuses on Droysen’s claim that the goal underlying historical writing and reading should be the development of the subjective capacity to think historically. In addition, Assis examines the connections and disconnections between Droysen’s theory of historical thinking, his practice of historical thought, and his political activism. Ultimately, Assis not only shows how Droysen helped reinvent the relationship between historical knowledge and human agency, but also traces some of the contradictions and limitations inherent to that project.
TRAVAUX ET MÉMOIRES XXVI, 2022
Apart from a brief sojourn at as a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington in 1968–9, James Howard-Johnston spent his entire academic career at the University of Oxford. After a period as Junior Research Lecturer at Christ Church from 1966 to 1971, he was thereafter University Lecturer in Byzantine Studies and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College until his retirement almost forty years later, in 2009. In the mid 2000s he served briefly as interim President of Corpus. From 1972 to 1987 he was also passionately involved in local politics, as an Oxford City Councillor and Oxfordshire County Councillor. With his retirement from politics came a flood of publications which has continued until today. Across his career James has cultivated a number of interests in, for example, the political and military histories of Byzantium, the Eurasian Steppe, and the Sasanian Empire; Byzantine historiography; medieval law and commerce; and, perhaps above all, the history of warfare, and in particular the “world crisis” which dramatically and permanently reordered the Middle East in the course of the seventh century. Readers of James’ bibliography up to 2022, which we include at the beginning of this volume, will perceive the simultaneous cultivation of all these interests, but also a growing preoccupation with the seventh century, which intensified from the 1990s and then culminated in two masterpieces of scholarship produced in his retirement—or, as James would say in typical self-depreciating style, his “defunctitude”. The first, Witnesses to a world crisis, represents a distillation of many years of careful rumination on the diverse sources for seventh-century political history, and a profound reflection on the rise of Islam and the Arab conquests. The second (for which Witnesses is in many ways the prequel), The last great war of antiquity, stands now as the first full history of the final conflict of the Roman and Iranian Empires, a grand topic of which James has long been the recognised master.
Historical Reviews and the History of Historiography in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Until the nineteenth century, the history of historiography could only be accounted through historical works, written by great historians over the time. From Herodotus to Leopold von Ranke many were the books that composed the vast legacy of the western historiographical culture. After the birth of Historische Zeitschrift, in 1859, however, it is maybe no longer possible to narrate this history without taking under consideration the main role played by scholarly historical periodicals. The aim of this presentation is, in one hand, to claim to the historical reviews their central role for the study of the contemporary global history of historiography; and, on the other hand, to contribute to the idea of the constitution of a specific field of study – the history of the historical journals – pointing some potential paths of investigation. If the history of historiography up to the nineteenth century was the history, in particular, of the relation between authors-works, I believe that in the twentieth century it can no longer be thought outside of the relation between periodicals-articles.