Distributed for Iter Press
Constructing European Historical Narratives in the Early Modern World
This volume showcases the diversity of contributors and voices that intervened and shaped historical narratives in early modern Europe.
Exploring the art of crafting historical narratives during the early modern period, Constructing European Historical Narratives in the Early Modern World reflects on the social and political implications of the diversification of research methods and writing practices associated with historical writing. It does so by considering the global and local situatedness of historical narratives from the perspective of both their makers and publics while interrogating the extent of the hegemony that a composite European world acquired over the elaboration of historical narratives.
The contributions to this volume take into account historical texts ranging from those most concerned with the self—revealing questions of personal or familial agency and identity—to those in which groups of writers collaborated to produce engaged narratives, to those focused on broader, disembodied concepts, such as language development and geographical features, using a significant mixture of textual references and personal experience. This volume deliberately mixes studies from numerous parts of Europe and its colonial outposts and juxtaposes writings by published scholars with the manuscript testimonies of occasional memorialists.
Exploring the art of crafting historical narratives during the early modern period, Constructing European Historical Narratives in the Early Modern World reflects on the social and political implications of the diversification of research methods and writing practices associated with historical writing. It does so by considering the global and local situatedness of historical narratives from the perspective of both their makers and publics while interrogating the extent of the hegemony that a composite European world acquired over the elaboration of historical narratives.
The contributions to this volume take into account historical texts ranging from those most concerned with the self—revealing questions of personal or familial agency and identity—to those in which groups of writers collaborated to produce engaged narratives, to those focused on broader, disembodied concepts, such as language development and geographical features, using a significant mixture of textual references and personal experience. This volume deliberately mixes studies from numerous parts of Europe and its colonial outposts and juxtaposes writings by published scholars with the manuscript testimonies of occasional memorialists.
538 pages | 3 color plates; 2 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2025
Reflections on Early Modernity / Réflexions sur la première modernité
History: European History, General History
Table of Contents
Introduction
Fabien Montcher and Hilary J. Bernstein
I. Agency and Identity: Telling One’s Story
What’s in a Name? Attesting and Contesting Genoese Family History
in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic
Richard Ibarra
Crusading Engagements: French Nobles’ Family Histories of
Religious Violence
Brian Sandberg
History Writing in Seventeenth-Century French Convents
Linda Lierheimer
Avétik, Louis XIV’s Armenian Prisoner: Narratives of
Confessional Conflict, Captivity, and Conversion in the Early
Modern Mediterranean
Junko Takeda
Puritan Narratives of Encounters in Early Eighteenth-Century
New England
Weiao Xing
II. Communities: Historical Collaborations, Engaged Arguments
Genealogical Histories: A New Literary Genre for an Uncertain Elite
Jonathan Spangler
Before the Bouillon Affair: The Counts of Auvergne and Genealogical
Debate in Early Modern France
Hilary J. Bernstein
Writing History in Provins: Social Positioning and Political
Commentary in a French Provincial Town in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries
Nicolas Schapira
Between Conflict and Collaboration: The Official Chronicler
and the Construction of Community Histories in the Kingdom of
Aragon and Beyond
Héloïse Hermant
An Alternative History of Early Modern Global Contacts?
Constructing Historical Narratives of the European Trade
Companies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Indravati Félicité
III. Humanism and History: Textual Traditions and Lived Experience
Writing a History of the Florentine Language: From the Aramei
to the Crusca
Ann E. Moyer
Identifying with the Martyrs: Martyrology and National History
in Ambrosio de Morales
Katherine Elliot van Liere
Giants, Language, and Historical Narratives in 1700
Anita Guerrini
Weaving the Past into the Present: Joachim Jungius’s Historical
Narratives of ‘Contemplative’ Textile Practices Seventeenth-Century
Hamburg
Michael Friedman
Volcano Aesthetics, Scholarly Ascents, and a Return to the Ancient
Past in Early Modern Europe
Ovanes Akopyan
Fabien Montcher and Hilary J. Bernstein
I. Agency and Identity: Telling One’s Story
What’s in a Name? Attesting and Contesting Genoese Family History
in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic
Richard Ibarra
Crusading Engagements: French Nobles’ Family Histories of
Religious Violence
Brian Sandberg
History Writing in Seventeenth-Century French Convents
Linda Lierheimer
Avétik, Louis XIV’s Armenian Prisoner: Narratives of
Confessional Conflict, Captivity, and Conversion in the Early
Modern Mediterranean
Junko Takeda
Puritan Narratives of Encounters in Early Eighteenth-Century
New England
Weiao Xing
II. Communities: Historical Collaborations, Engaged Arguments
Genealogical Histories: A New Literary Genre for an Uncertain Elite
Jonathan Spangler
Before the Bouillon Affair: The Counts of Auvergne and Genealogical
Debate in Early Modern France
Hilary J. Bernstein
Writing History in Provins: Social Positioning and Political
Commentary in a French Provincial Town in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries
Nicolas Schapira
Between Conflict and Collaboration: The Official Chronicler
and the Construction of Community Histories in the Kingdom of
Aragon and Beyond
Héloïse Hermant
An Alternative History of Early Modern Global Contacts?
Constructing Historical Narratives of the European Trade
Companies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Indravati Félicité
III. Humanism and History: Textual Traditions and Lived Experience
Writing a History of the Florentine Language: From the Aramei
to the Crusca
Ann E. Moyer
Identifying with the Martyrs: Martyrology and National History
in Ambrosio de Morales
Katherine Elliot van Liere
Giants, Language, and Historical Narratives in 1700
Anita Guerrini
Weaving the Past into the Present: Joachim Jungius’s Historical
Narratives of ‘Contemplative’ Textile Practices Seventeenth-Century
Hamburg
Michael Friedman
Volcano Aesthetics, Scholarly Ascents, and a Return to the Ancient
Past in Early Modern Europe
Ovanes Akopyan