Abstract This article expands the notion of “regimes of historicity,” developed by historian François Hartog, and interrogates its applicability for the study of French history-writing from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. A regime of historicity is the specific articulation of past, present, and future that members of a certain milieu envision at a certain point in time and that enables them to develop a sense of history based on this temporal framework. This article makes the case for regimes of historicity as a heuristic to study understandings of time, temporality, and history in medieval French historiography, while also inviting closer attention to the material books that transmit history-writing and shape it in significant ways. Asking how manuscripts and early print books produced and implemented regimes of historicity for various audiences enables a granular approach to premodern conceptions of history and offers a complement to the paradigm of “culture historique” that prevails notably in French scholarship on medieval historiography. Regimes of historicity thus serve as a malleable lens through which to approach an ever-changing landscape of history-writing through material artifacts.
Abstract The Dit des roys is a text that has been little studied to date, mainly because of its nature, halfway between a chronicle and a simple list of French kings, and because it provides no new information about events, not to mention its numerous factual errors. This article shows that such a text, far from being useless, is a gateway to a better understanding of the relationship fifteenth-century readers had with history. Through an analysis of the writing material, associated works, layout choices, and reading marks, this article highlights a bourgeois (in the medieval sense of the word) regime of historicity, which is constructed around lists and numbers. The study of the manuscripts also allows us to highlight the didactic use of the work and its probable oral dissemination in a private or even public setting. This article thus adds nuance to a description of the medieval regime of historicity that is too often limited to its religious and moral dimensions.
Abstract This study examines how closed books convey medieval historicity, focusing on the library of John, Count of Angoulême (1400–1467), documented in an inventory, with over seventy-five surviving codices. Offering a complement to François Hartog’s text-centric regimes of historicity, it argues that unopened historiographical manuscripts shape perceptions of the past through external features, specifically titles visible on the outside, independent of their contents. John’s library, housed at his castle in Cognac, categorized history via “landmarks” or “metaphorical keys,” predominantly personal names of authors or actors, anchoring chronicles, mirrors for princes, travelogues, and romances to individual figures. These labels displayed on spines, edges, or covers projected a broad, inclusive historicity encompassing factual and mythical narratives. In contrast, genealogies of French kings, titled to highlight familial succession, connected past and present, grounding John’s royal lineage in chronological continuity. The naming system, reflecting the count’s identity as a French royal prince, created a spectacle of closed books that imparted a sense of temporality on observers, shedding light on medieval practices of display over reading. By analyzing the inventory’s emphasis on external markers, this study reveals how unopened books shaped medieval historical consciousness.
This article focuses on the five books of the Chronique fran & ccedil;aise that Guillaume Cretin successively presented to King Francis I, in the form of richly ornate manuscripts, between 1515 and 1525 (Paris, BnF, MSS fr. 2817 to 2822). Through an analysis of the structure of the books, it first examines how the historical narrative moves from a regime of historicity essentially based on continuity between the origins of the French monarchy and the present day, to a mainly mythical regime of historicity in which the kings and queens represented functions like mirrors for the prince. The latter regime of historicity is based on a biblical typology in which events and characters echo and illuminate each other. Second, through a more detailed study of the paratext (whether attributable to Cretin or not), the text's thresholds, and the paintings adorning the royal manuscripts, the article argues that this change in the regime of historicity is accompanied by a change in the regime of authority over the work, the figure of the royal patron being gradually replaced by the one of the historiographer, whose judgments and even life structure the narrative.
This article aims to understand the extent to which the medium, whether manuscript or printed, influences the regimes of historicity in Froissart's Chroniques. It shows that the change of medium is mainly inscribed in a shift in book production: The abridged manuscript versions and printed books are aimed at a new audience of officers and finan-ciers, rather than a specific patron from the high military nobility. To appeal to them, the way the history is told changes. These different regimes of historicity, adapted to each audience, are approached from three angles: the construction of historical events and their structure, which shows an interest in political history; the ethos of the chronicler, resolutely placed on the side of the past historian who writes and not on the side of the war reporter who actively investigates; and the relationship between the narrated past and the present of the reader.
This study examines how closed books convey medieval historicity, focusing on the library of John, Count of Angoul & ecirc;me (1400-1467), documented in an inventory, with over seventy-five surviving codices. Offering a complement to Fran & ccedil;ois Hartog's text-centric regimes of historicity, it argues that unopened historiographical manuscripts shape perceptions of the past through external features, specifically titles visible on the outside, independent of their contents. John's library, housed at his castle in Cognac, categorized history via "landmarks" or "metaphorical keys," predominantly personal names of authors or actors, anchoring chronicles, mirrors for princes, travelogues, and romances to individual figures. These labels displayed on spines, edges, or covers projected a broad, inclusive historicity encompassing factual and mythical narratives. In contrast, genealogies of French kings, titled to highlight familial succession, connected past and present, grounding John's royal lineage in chronological continuity. The naming system, reflecting the count's identity as a French royal prince, created a spectacle of closed books that imparted a sense of temporality on observers, shedding light on medieval practices of display over reading. By analyzing the inventory's emphasis on external markers, this study reveals how unopened books shaped medieval historical consciousness.
The Dit des roys is a text that has been little studied to date, mainly because of its nature, halfway between a chronicle and a simple list of French kings, and because it provides no new information about events, not to mention its numerous factual errors. This article shows that such a text, far from being useless, is a gateway to a better understanding of the relationship fifteenth-century readers had with history. Through an analysis of the writing material, associated works, layout choices, and reading marks, this article highlights a bourgeois (in the medieval sense of the word) regime of historicity, which is constructed around lists and numbers. The study of the manuscripts also allows us to highlight the didactic use of the work and its probable oral dissemination in a private or even public setting. This article thus adds nuance to a description of the medieval regime of historicity that is too often limited to its religious and moral dimensions.
This article expands the notion of "regimes of historicity," developed by historian Fran & ccedil;ois Hartog, and interrogates its applicability for the study of French historywriting from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. A regime of historicity is the specific articulation of past, present, and future that members of a certain milieu envision at a certain point in time and that enables them to develop a sense of history based on this temporal framework. This article makes the case for regimes of historicity as a heuristic to study understandings of time, temporality, and history in medieval French historiography, while also inviting closer attention to the material books that transmit history-writing and shape it in significant ways. Asking how manuscripts and early print books produced and implemented regimes of historicity for various audiences enables a granular approach to premodern conceptions of history and offers a complement to the paradigm of "culture historique" that prevails notably in French scholarship on medieval historiography. Regimes of historicity thus serve as a malleable lens through which to approach an everchanging landscape of history-writing through material artifacts.
This essay is about books and the presence of the past. Its two case studies are a thirteenth-century French multitext manuscript (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1450) and one of the texts written in it (Benoit de Sainte-Maure's mid-twelfth-century Roman de Troie). These are used to describe four regimes of historicity: modes of temporal experience that differ most in their sense of the past's availability to the present, particularly in the form of (real and invented) books. Benoit's classic articulation of translatio studii in the Troie prologue is read in terms of a regime that places emphasis on the inaccessibility of the past and the fragility of the present. The manuscript's choices of arrangement-themselves often read as a form of translatio-are reframed, first via a codicological investigation and then with reference to the literary and material cultures of the mid-thirteenth century. The individual and comparative articulation of these regimes of historicity allows for a view of the manuscript as containing all of them in a structure of material simultaneity. This last regime, the manuscript present, involves an experience of the contingency of the past that constitutes a form of premodern historical consciousness, grounded in the material text.
This article examines the layered historicity of a French Bible manuscript made for King Charles VI in the early fifteenth century, an especially turbulent time for France and its monarch. Fran & ccedil;ois Hartog's concept of regimes of historicity can shed some light on how political crises of the time shaped content created with King Charles VI in mind and on what his French Bible manuscript's unique contents, annotations, and illustrations indicate about perceptions of temporal, causal, and typological relationships between events in the face of an uncertain future. The manuscript's conception of history does in some ways corroborate Hartog's characterization of medieval historicity in terms of historia magistra vitae-looking to great leaders and heroes of the past for models to emulate-combined with a salvation history that situates the present in between the Crucifixion and an awaited Second Coming. Yet, at the same time, as this article argues, the manuscript's expressed anxieties, its efforts to change the course of events, and its impulse to bear witness to and memorialize Charles VI's turbulent reign for later generations of readers all suggest more expansive, largely present- and future-oriented historicities than Hartog ascribes to the period.
This article describes regimes of historicity in manuscripts from the first fifty years of circulation of Guyart des Moulins's Bible historiale (1291-95). The articulations of past, present, and future in manuscripts of this French Bible translation strongly center history in the here and now of reading, while, at the same time, manuscripts stress how the biblical past is mediated to readers through layers of discourse. For these reasons, this article argues that the regimes of historicity of Bible historiale are best described as "bookish," meaning that they exceeded purely textual dimensions and derived their values and meaning from a repertoire of conventions associated with books produced in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. After contextualizing Guyart's translation as a relative eccentricity in the cultural landscape of the late thirteenth century, this article hypothesizes how early fourteenth-century readers might have encountered Bible historiale manuscripts in the here and now of praelectio (public recitation) and describes the changes that Guyart's text underwent in the first decades of the new century, which placed the regime of historicity envisioned by him in tension with the new paradigms introduced predominantly by Parisian bookmakers.
Résumé S’appuyant sur une analyse de Ziméo de Saint-Lambert (1769) et de Mirza de Madame de Staël (1786), cet article se propose de montrer de quelle manière, et au prix de quels changements, la fiction coloniale française du dix-huitième siècle parvient à inclure et à représenter l’Autre africain. Pour ce faire, il s’interroge sur les innovations poétiques et stylistiques que véhicule la construction de l’altérité (le corps et la voix de l’Africain) dans les textes en question, tout en retraçant, par l’étude des personnages noirs, l’horizon philosophique et esthétique qui les anime.
This article explores cultural diplomacy, focusing on contemporary exhibitions of Chilean artist José Venturelli and their significance in Chile-China relations. Using a microhistorical approach, the study explores the intricate connections between art, travel, and translation as essential components of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War era and their enduring impact on contemporary Chile-China relations. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Jan de Vris, John-Paul Ghobrial, and Francesca Trivellato, this article emphasizes the importance of integrating microhistory and global history to gain a comprehensive understanding of historical events. It highlights the role of individuals such as Venturelli in bridging cultural divides and promoting mutual understanding, shedding light on the transnational dynamics of cultural exchange and diplomacy. Ultimately, the article highlights the potential of microhistory to challenge dominant narratives and provide a nuanced perspective on the history of country-to-country relations, offering valuable insights into the complexities of cultural relations and their impact on global dynamics.
Bertolt Brecht’s famous question “Who built Thebes with the seven gates?” opens one of the classics of microhistory. This allows for an association between microhistory and intellectual history, especially from the perspective of the recovery of its “material” aspect: the circulation and reception of ideas, no longer understood in terms of internal reading and discursive analysis but in terms of a plural conception that recovers the importance of readers and the—until recently rather anonymous—work of printers, translators, editors, distributors, and so on. Beyond the question of the survival of microhistory as a “school,” several of its proposals have been integrated as constitutive tools of historiographical practice in general. Based on the analysis of contributions in intellectual history in Latin America, this essay attempts to address a link that is rarely made explicit and, perhaps, is not even recognized by its practitioners: the connection between microhistorical approaches and the study of reception and circulation of ideas in the region.
The article interprets silence as a heuristic possibility for microhistory. To achieve this objective, it first presents a theoretical reflection on the metaphor of webs and their intimate relationship with the void, a specific form of silence. It goes on to interpret and connect historical documents related to censorship and the police. This demonstrates that deciphering mutism opens a specific window into the past and that, in microhistory, silences appear as revealing mechanisms that serve to weave units of information as an integral part of historical writing.
This article examines the daily interactions that transformed Buenos Aires’s barrio de los rusos (Russian quarter) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than treating anarchism and prostitution as discrete phenomena, it constructs a unified narrative of their interconnected social experiences within a shared urban space. Beginning in 1904, a concentrated area of multiethnic commercial streets became the site of dramatic convergence among anarchists, prostitutes, and pimps—a volatile social formation that confounded police, community leaders, and contemporary observers alike. Inspired by microhistorians Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni’s proposal of “following the name,” this article adopts a strategy of “following the place”—tracing how the same locations appear across a variety of historical records, such as police, judicial, and diplomatic documents, as well as literary and press accounts. Drawing on insights from South American migration studies, it illuminates previously obscured zones of social experience among migrants who fell under police surveillance in Buenos Aires. Through an analysis of the proximities and distances generated by conflictive coexistence, the article demonstrates how these interactions reshaped Buenos Aires’s urban landscape and acquired explosive new meaning by 1909, when a young Ukrainian assassinated the city’s chief of police.
