Interdisciplinary Methodology of Historical Research: An Introduction

COURSE SCHEDULE AND READINGS

Session 1
1 Introduction to the Sources, Methodology and Research Skills of Historical Studies (Balázs Nagy - Balázs Trencsényi)
This introductory lecture will give an insight into the typology of medieval and modern historical sources, the method of source criticism and also highlighting the main research problems in contemporary historiography.

Obligatory Readings:

• Bloch, Marc. The Historian’s Craft. Translated by Peter Putnam. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992: 17-39 (Ch. 1: “History, Men, and Time”) [pdf]
• Donald Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (Yale UP, 1999) pp. 186-216.

Optional Readings:

• Evans, R. J., “Historians and their facts”, in Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History. W. W. Norton and Company, New York, 2000. pp. 65-87.
• Caenegem, Raoul Charles van; Ganshof, François Louis: Guide to the sources of medieval history. Amsterdam  North-Holland, 1978: 13-127.

Session 2
2 What are the Middle Ages? (Gábor Klaniczay)
The lecture will provide a general introduction to the study of the Middle Ages, offering also a historiographical overview of this field of research. The main concepts of medieval studies are in constant debate and re-formulation, like féodalité, vassality, etc. The lecture will discuss those concepts and also survey the main social and cultural structures of the European Middle Ages.

Obligatory Readings:

• Klaniczay, Gábor: “The Middle Ages”, in International Encyclopaedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, eds. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2001, vol. 14, pp. 9785-9792. [pdf]
• Pohl, Walter: “Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies”, in Lester K. Little, Barbara H. Rosenwein (eds.): Debating the Middle Ages: issues and readings. pp. 15-24. [pdf]
• Brown, Elisabeth A. R.: “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe”. in Lester K. Little, Barbara H. Rosenwein (eds.): Debating the Middle Ages: issues and readings. 148-169; reprinted from The American Historical Review, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Oct., 1974): 1063-1088. [JSTOR]

Session 3
3 Early Modern History: Problems, Methods, Approaches (László Kontler – György E. Szőnyi)
The class deals with the methodological questions of early-modern history, both in terms of the heuristics and ambiguous theoretical implications of the very category of “early-modern” as well as the specific research questions related to the historiography dealing with 16-18th century phenomena.

Obligatory Readings:

• Peter Burke, The Renaissance sense of the past (New York : St. Martin's Press, 1970), pp. 77-104. [pdf1][pdf2]
• Natalie Zemon Davis "On the Lame" The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 3 (Jun., 1988), pp. 572-603 [JSTOR]

Optional Readings:

• Reinhart Koselleck “Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process,” in: Futures past: on the semantics of historical time (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985)
• Evans, R. J. W. The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550-1700: an Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), pp. 3-40.

Session 4

4 History beyond the traditional European focus (Aziz al-Azmeh)
The class will enhance and complete the geographical and temporal parameters of the course. It intends to integrate the period of late antiquity and to give an account of the eastern Mediterranean without which the history of the middle ages would be incomplete.

Obligatory reading:

• Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), ch. XIII-XVI., p. 160-203. [pdf]

Session 5
5 Forms and interactions of religions: Eastern and Western Christianity, Judaism and Islam (György Geréby – Matthias Riedl)
The seminar will cover the most important issues of the historic emergence of the three “monotheistic” religions in relationship with each other (in the broadest possible sense of an overview), showing the most important points of their doctrinal conflicts until the first half of the modern period, including the rifts of the Christian church, and the branches of Islam.

Obligatory Readings:

• Laura Engelstein, “Holy Russia in Modern Times: An Essay on Orthodoxy and Cultural Change”, Past and Present, 173 (2001): 129-156. [JSTOR]
• Scholem, Gershom, “Towards an understanding of the messianic idea in Judaism” in: The messianic idea in Judaism and other essays on Jewish spirituality (New York : Schocken Books, 1995), 1-36. [pdf]

Optional Readings:

• Chadwick, H., East and West: the making of a rift in the Church: from apostolic times until the Council of Florence, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003
• Peters, F. E., The monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in conflict and competition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003
• Aslan, Reza, No god but God: the origins, evolution, and future of Islam, New York: Random House, 2005.

Session 6
6 Art History and material culture: From Sacred to Profane (Béla Zsolt Szakács )
The lecture will give an introduction to the origins of art history, from the history of artists to the history of art. The institutional background will be examined also (museums, academies, universities, collections and exhibitions), the problem of the architectural heritage and monument protection. The lecturer will give examples of the critical reading of works of art, the meaning in the visual art: sacred and profane iconography. Questions, like the power of images, the limits of classical art history:
visual culture and the new art history will be analyzed as well.

Obligatory Readings:

• Panofsky, Erwin: Meaning in the visual arts. London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 23-50. [pdf]
• Museum culture. Histories, discourses, spectacles. Ed. by Daniel J. Sherman-Irit Rogoff, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, pp. 3-21. [pdf]

Optional Readings:

• Kultermann, Udo, The history of art history. New York: Abaris Books, 1994
• Haskell, Francis, History and its Images. Art and the Interpretation of the Past. (New Haven – London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 1-12.
• Object, Image, Inquiry. The Art Historian at Work. Ed. by Marilyn Schmidt. Santa Monica: The Getty Art History Information Program, 1988
• Grabar, André, Christian Iconography. A Study of Its Origins. Princeton University Press, 1961

Session 7

7 Science and History (Karl Hall)
Historians have long had an ambivalent relationship to the methodologies of the natural sciences, and most practitioners now shun Rankean positivist ambitions to scienticity for their craft. Yet the subject matter of the sciences has provided a rich testing ground for new forms of historical critique in the last half century. The class will introduce the students to two historians of science whose work has had the broadest resonance within other branches of history-writing.

Obligatory Readings:

• Thomas S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 1-34, 110-134. [pdf1][pdf2]
• Michel Foucault, "Panopticism," from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Penguin, 1991 [1977]), 195-228. [pdf]

Optional Readings:

• Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. The industrialization of time and space in the 19th century (University of California Press, 1979), pp. 1-40.
• Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 126-149.

Session8

8 Lieux de mémoire: From Holy Place to Cultural Heritage Site (József Laszlovszky)
Field Trip to Heroes’s Square, meeting there at 10 AM
This class deals with the cultural heritage issues, which in the recent years has become exceedingly complex, due to a host of factors: there are the continuing historical, religious and political aspects, the increasing economic possibilities, particularly with regard to tourism and the heritage “business,” and ongoing educational concerns, such as the role of cultural heritage materials. The participants will get an introduction to the development of a hierarchy of heritage sites (world heritage, national heritage, local heritage etc.), which has also produced very contradictory practices concerning the ownership, institutional control, public control and scholarly research possibilities.

Obligatory Readings:

• Lowenthal, David, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge University Press, 1998. 1-30. [pdf]
• Andre Vauchez, “The cathedral,” in Realms of Memory ed. Pierre Nora Vol. II, New York, 1997, pp. 37-68. [pdf]

Optional Readings:

• Heritage protection within the compass of legal regulation: from law to law: stories from 120 years of institutional heritage protection. Judit Tamási (ed.) Budapest: Országos Műemlékvédelmi Hivatal, 2001.
• Archaeological Resource Management in the UK. An Introduction. John Hunter – Ian Ralston (eds.)Alan Sutton. Institute of Field Archaeologists. Stroud 1993

Session 9 
9 Recent Histories: Orality, Visuality, and the Archives (István Rév)
The class deals with the methodological questions raised by the recently emerging thematic category of “Recent history”. Most importantly, it will revisit some of the methodological offers designed to tackle pasts events which still have an immediate presence in the given community.

Obligatory Readings:

• Patrick H. Hutton, “Placing Memory in Contemporary Historiography”, in Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory  (Hanover, VT: University Press of New England, 1993), 1-26. [pdf]
• Alessandro Portelli, “Oral History as Genre,” in A. Portelli, The Battle Of Valla Guila, Oral History And The Art Of Dialogue, Madison, Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press, 1997, 3-23. [pdf]

Optional Readings:

• Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence. A history of the Image before the Era of Art. (trans. By Edmund Jephcott) Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1994. (excerpts);
• Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe," from The politics of retribution in Europe : World War II and its aftermath, edited by István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 293-324.

Session 10

10 Sociology and Social History (Viktor Karády)
The class introduces some of the key problems concerning the practice of social history. It seeks to present modern social history in terms of a shift of interest from political events to socio-economic structures, and a change in historical methods from narrative to quantitative techniques and interdisciplinary models of interpretation.

Obligatory Readings:

• Eric Hobsbawm, “From Social History to the History of Society,” in Felix Gilbert and Graubard, Stephen, eds., Historical Studies Today (New York: WW Norton, 1972), pp. 1-26. [pdf]
• Geoff Eley, “Some Recent Tendencies in Social Studies,” in Georg G. Iggers and Harold T. Parker, eds., International handbook of Historical Studies: Contemporary Research and Theory (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 55-70. [pdf]

Optional Readings:

• “History and Social Science: A Critical Turning Point” in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories: French constructions of the past, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: New Press, 1995), pp. 480-483.
• Antoine Prost, “What Has Happened to French Social History?” The Historical Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Sept. 1992), pp. 671-679. [JSTOR]
• Georg G. Iggers, “Critical Theory and Social History: ‘Historical Social Science’ in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in Historiography in the Twentieth Century, pp. 65-77.

Session 11
11 Urban space, production and exchange: towns and countryside (most probably Markian Prokopovych)
The lecture examines key issues of the European urbanization, discussing the regional differences in this process. The changes of the contraction and expansion periods of European towns frame this development. A special emphasis will be given to the emergence of modern European towns and its social implications.

Obligatory Readings:

• Peter Hanak: The garden and the workshop: essays on the cultural history of Vienna and Budapest. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998. “Urbanization and Civilization” Pp. 3-43. [pdf]

Optional Readings:

• Edith Ennen, The Medieval Town; translated by Natalie Fryde. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979. Chapter 3: The emergence of the medieval town, pp. 63-93.
• Keith D. Lilley, Urban Life in the Middle Ages, 1000-1450. London : Palgrave, 2002. Chapter 6: Urban property and landholding, pp. 178-211.
• Carl Schorske: Fin-de-siècle Vienna: politics and culture. Vintage, 1981. “The Ringstrasse, Its Critics, and the Birth of Urban Modernism” pp. 24-115.
• Akos Moravanszky, Competing Visions. Aesthetic Invention and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture 1867-1918, Cambridge, Mass. London, England, 1999, The MIT Press, Chapter 2: "The City as Political Monument", p. 25-61.

Session 12

12 Empires, states, nations and historical regions (Constantin Iordachi)
The class will focus on the questions concerning the national frame of history-writing. It seeks to present some of the alternative frameworks challenging the national perspective, such as imperial and transnational history.

Obligatory Readings:

• Brubaker, Rogers W. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1-17. [pdf]
• Bruce Mazlish, “Comparing Global History to World History” Journal of Interdisciplinary History XXVIII/3 (Winter 1998), 385-95.
• Philipp Ther, “Imperial instead of National History: Positioning Modern German History on the Map of European Empires,” in A. Miller and Alfred J. Rieber (eds.) Imperial Rule. Budapest – New York, CEU Press, 2004, pp. 47-69. [pdf]

Optional Readings:

• Francine Hirsch, "Toward an Empire of Nations: Border-Making and the Formation of Soviet National Identities," Russian Review 59 (2000): 201-226.
• Wiliam H. McNeill, “The Changing Shape of World History,” History and Theory 34/2 (1995), 8-27.
• Donald Quartaert. The Ottoman Empire. 1700-1922. Cambridge Univ. Press. , 2000. p. 89-110.

Session 13

13 New methods and new approaches: gender, anthropology, environment (Gábor Gyáni, Gerhard Jaritz)
The lecture deals with approaches and fields that have particularly developed in the recent decades and have generally influenced History and Medieval Studies in a decisive way: Historical Anthropology, Women and Gender History, History of Mentalities and Daily Life, New Cultural History, Environmental History, History of Visual Culture, etc. They will also be particularly discussed within the framework of the application of a variety of trans-disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods.

Obligatory Readings:

• Nancy Partner, “No Sex, No Gender,” Speculum, vol. 68, 2 (April 1993): 419-43. [pdf]
• Clifford Geertz: "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man". In: Kiernan Ryan ed., New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996), 5-11. [pdf]
• Worster, Donald. “The Vulnerable Earth: Toward a Planetary History. From The Ends of the Earth. Perspectives on Modern Environmental History”, ed. Donald Worster, Cambridge University Press, 1988. 3-20. [pdf]

Optional Readings:

• Barbara H. Rosenwein, "Review Essay: Worrying about Emotions in History," American Historical Review 107 (2002): 821-45
• Alf Lüdtke, "Introduction: What Is the History of Everyday Life and Who Are Its Practitioners?", In: The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing historical experiences and ways of life, ed. idem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3-40.
• Aaron Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, Jane Howlett, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
• Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, June 2003)
• Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe, ed. John Howe and Michael Wolfe (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002)
• Joan W. Scott, “Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis”, American Historical Review 91 (1986), 1053-1075. [JSTOR]