The construction of useful pasts: the act of committing to memory, archive, and narrative in early-modern and medieval societies, Eastern and Western
Putting into the past is a gesture profoundly rooted in medieval and early-modern societies. Through archiving and writing, producing the usable past for a present or in the thought of a future mobilized secular and ecclesiastic powers and their personnel, administrations, and artisans and it constituted an essential dimension of scholarly work. Our project seeks to better understand the means, objectives, and the effects of this activity of creating the past.
Each placement in the past is a localized operation that has meaning in a precise context; the investigations already undertaken or envisioned by the members of the Center for the Social and Cultural History of the West (CHiSCO) and the partners assembled by our team around this project demand to be collected and confronted, in order to enable the emergence, in all its significance, an activity that has heretofore been perceived only piecemeal, even though the previous gestures of putting into the past still influence our current representation of these pasts.
The project will principally consist of a multi-year, joint seminar and then a conference that will involve experienced researchers as well as graduate students. It targets, in several ways, a large student audience and includes a robust digital component.
Project managers
Franck COLLARD , Directeur du Centre d'Histoire Sociale et Culturelle de l'Occident (CHISCO) , Université Paris Nanterre
Nicolas SCHAPIRA , Directeur du Centre d'Histoire Sociale et Culturelle de l'Occident (CHISCO) , Université Paris Nanterre
Internal cluster partners
- Histoire des Arts et des Représentations (HAR) - EA 4414
- Archéologies et Sciences de l'Antiquité (ArScAn) - UMR 7041
Associated partners
Centre d'Histoire Sociale et Culturelle de l'Occident (CHISCO-EA1587)
https://chisco.parisnanterre.fr/
Duration
22 moisKeywords
Archive, memory, construction of the past, narratives