(Un)doing History
A Case for Epistemological Alterity
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5048870 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Seth (0000-0003-3303-1359, University of California, Santa Cruz, corresponding author), Vanita Seth (University of California, Santa Cruz) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 63 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 112-136 |
| Publication date | 2024-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History and Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/hith.12334 |
| OpenAlex | W4390448163 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 3 |
This article addresses two primary tensions that currently beset medieval history. The first concerns a contentious debate within the field regarding the relative merits of two interpretative approaches: that which seeks to situate the Middle Ages within a narrative of continuity wherein aspects of the medieval bear some relationship of familiarity with the present and that which accords a radical alterity to the past that instigates moments of historical rupture. The second tension concerns the fraught relationship between history as a site of knowledge production with some proximity to engaging and producing truth and history as constructed, wherein its purported object of study, the past, is not an ontological fact but a cultural artifact. In this instance, what we witness is less a debate among scholars within history than an amorphic anxiety about history. This article makes a case for engaging the radical alterity that confronts the historian of the Middle Ages. It does so, however, cognizant of an ontological impasse: if alterity is attentive to difference, a difference that resists translation into modern knowledge regimes, then what does it mean to engage it historically-that is, through a temporal structure that would have been foreign to the very period of study
Aesthetics · Alterity · Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Meaning (existential · Middle Ages · Narrative · Object (grammar · Sociology · Witness · Medieval Literature and History · History · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2025 (2) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |