One of the very first things you will learn in History at undergraduate level is that there are many different sub-disciplines within the discipline of analysing History, and you will at some point need to focus and zoom in to certain topics in order to have a better argument. Therefore I will explain to you the different categories of historiography in multiple posts.
In this post, I will be focusing on Cultural History. So what actually is cultural history and what are some key historians associated within this sub-discipline?
Cultural history – the history of everything:
- Overlaps with other sub-disciplines, such as political and social history
- Highly attuned to input from other humanities and social science subjects
- Not only study of ‘high culture’, more culture ‘from below’ often at forefront of progressive, emancipatory history
- Catholic approach to history making
Jacob Burckhardt: The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860):
- One of the first historians to move beyond notion that history is past politics and current history
- Stressed the importance of using art, literature and architecture as primary source material
- Argued that the Renaissance brought together art, literature and politics to bring about ‘modernity’ and engineered the crucible of individuality
- Not just the study of ‘great men’ but also cultural production that produced freedoms from old medieval worldviews and produced ‘the modern’
Carlo Ginzburg: The Cheese and the Worms (1971):
- Perhaps the most influential pioneering cultural ‘micro-history’
- Follows the beliefs of the 16th century Italian miller, Menocchio, an ‘ordinary’ man on trial for heresy and subsequently executed
- Ginzburg reveals a complex (and often progressive) cosmology based on multiple influences, rooted in popular Italian culture, pre-Christian oral religious traditions and elite Christian teaching
- A study of popular culture through one charismatic but non-elite man to reveal social conflicts of the age, a window again into ‘unofficial’ history, illuminating more complexity than straight readings of elite sources
Patrick Joyce: Visions of the People (1991):
- Rather than focus on social structure to recover the lives of working-class Brits, pay attention to the meanings attached to historical actions
- Class and class consciousness obsession squeezes out other historical shared ideas on social order that do not derive from language of class, much more diverse working-class imaginaries
- He identifies a ‘family’ of populisms’ – rather than a homogenous ‘class’ – often by looking at symbolic and non-verbal representations
- ‘the people’ is a much more disaggregated category than old school Marxist historians would have it for Patrick Joyce