Historians Without Borders? L’Histoire Croisée And Early Modern Social History

Abstract

All historical scholarship involves certain fundamental choices about perspective. Some of these spring from the general interests of the historian intellectual, political, economic and the scholarly debates in which he or she chooses to engage. Others are largely dictated by the nature of the evidence eyewitness testimony, interrogation transcripts, personal memoirs, legal protocols, birth and burial records, and so forth. Still other choices about perspective involve the form in which the historian presents and analyzes such evidence statistical comparisons, biography or a similar narrative model, abstract discourses about ideas. All three decisions are obviously closely related but this chapter focuses on the third perspectival choice, the form that a historical investigation takes how this form shapes the historical argument, and the possibilities that a new methodology known as l'histoire Croisee offers to those engaged in early modern social history. Keywords: burial records; early modern social history; historical scholarship; L'histoire Croisee