Book_Winter2009:Book Winter 2007.qxd 12/15/2008 9:53 AM Page 71

Caroline W. Bynum

Perspectives, connections & Objekte:
what’s happening in history now?

In 1997, Princeton University Press
published a volume, What’s Happened to
the Humanities?, which rang with alarm.1
Even contributors such as Francis Oak-
ley, Carla Hesse, and Lynn Hunt, WHO
tried to warn against despair by explain-
ing how the current situation had come
um, provided only a fragile defense
against fundamental and deeply threat-
ening change, while others such as Denis
Donoghue and Gertrude Himmelfarb
wrote in palpable fear of the future. Als
Frank Kermode, author of an earlier,
brilliant study of our need for literary
endings, phrased it in his essay for the
Volumen, “If we wanted to be truly apoc-
alyptic we should even consider the
possibility that nothing of much pres-
ent concern either to ‘humanists’ or
to their opponents will long survive.”

Caroline W. Bynum, a Fellow of the American
Academy since 1993, is professor of Western Eu-
ropean Medieval History in the School of Histor-
ical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Her most recent book, “Wonderful Blood: Theol-
ogy and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Ger-
many and Beyond” (2007), received the Ameri-
can Academy of Religion’s 2007 Award for Excel-
lence in Historical Studies.

And it was clear from his essay that he
was more afraid of the end of literature
than of the demise of those who, as he
Leg es, “mistrust or despise” it.2

Returning ten years later–and from
the perspective of a historian–to the
scenarios feared or envisioned in 1997,
what strikes me is how wrong they
war, but for reasons quite different
from those given in the spate of re-
cent publications alleging some sort
of new “turn” (narrative, sozial, sein-
torical, Material, eclectic, or perfor-
mative, to name a few) “beyond” the
earlier turn (linguistic, cultural, post-
strukturell, postmodern, und so weiter)

1 Alvin Kernan, Hrsg., What’s Happened to the
Humanities? (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1997). For helpful discussion of
the issues raised in my article and for bibli-
ographical suggestions, I am grateful to Pa-
tricia Crone, Nicola di Cosmo, Jeffrey Ham-
burger, Jonathan Israel, Peter Jelavich, Joel
Kaye, Barbara Kowalzig, Glenn Peers, Joan
Scott, Heinrich von Staden, and Stephen D.
White.

2 Frank Kermode, “Changing Epochs," In
What’s Happened to the Humanities? Hrsg. Ker-
nan, 162–178, especially 177. On literary end-
ings, see Kermode, Sense of an Ending: Studien
in the Theory of Fiction: With a New Epilogue
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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Caroline W.
Bynum
on the
humanities

that supposedly caused all the trouble
in the ½rst place. For as Keith Thomas
remarked in an astute and upbeat as-
sessment in 2006, historical scholar-
ship has become broader, more nu-
anced and more creative over the past
decade.3 It has done so exactly because
the insights of the linguistic turn have
been absorbed and utilized; and this
has happened because those insights
coincide in great part with what histo-
rians have always known.

I do not dismiss or ridicule the fears
of the mid-1990s. What Alvin Kernan
calls “reading to ½nd the villain” did
threaten both sensitive literary criti-
cism and thoughtful historical account.4
Darüber hinaus, we can all remember state-
gen (better now left unattributed)
about the footnote as instrument of
patriarchal domination, or the vio-
lence of the meta-narrative, that con-
fused scholarly prose with the physi-
cal abuse of persons and communities
(although if my memory serves, solch
opinions were more characteristic of
the 1970s than the 1990s). Es gab
times in the past three decades when
ICH, zu, felt that literary criticism tend-
ed to barricade, behind the barbed
wire of jargon, the poetry and ½ction
to which I had always turned when I
wanted to imagine something differ-
ent from myself or to explore, in some
resonant yet also quiet place, the com-
plexity of my human hopes and fears.
Attention to the stance and perspec-
tive of the historian, critic, or anthro-
pologist did lead to a sometimes tire-

3 Keith Thomas, “History Revisited,” The Times
Literary Supplement, Oktober 11, 2006.

4 Alvin Kernan, “Change in the Humanities
and Higher Education,” in What’s Happened to
the Humanities? Hrsg. Kernan, 9.

Dædalus Winter 2009

some narcissism, even solipsism, In
scholarly writing.5 But little of this
seems to me to have been postmodern
or poststructuralist per se. As a contribu-
tor to The Three Penny Review said recent-
ly, there have always been bad books,6
just as there have always been envious,
defensive, and silly scholarly responses
to other scholars. And if, as Lynn Hunt
pointed out in 1997, the growth of new
subjects such as feminism, Geschlecht, post-
colonialism, and cultural studies was a
response to changing demographics, es ist
unreasonable not to expect an increase
in the sheer number of bad books in
such burgeoning ½elds, since nothing
suggests that brilliance is characteristic
of a larger percentage of today’s under-
graduates, graduate students, or profes-
sors than it was earlier.7 Moreover, als
publishers are increasingly willing to
review and publish manuscripts in only
those areas they think will sell, and de-
partment chairpersons and senior pro-
fessors put greater and greater pressure
on young scholars to produce what Jon-
athan Beck has cynically called work
that counts, is countable, and is count-
Hrsg, it will require courage (as indeed it
has always done) to tackle genuinely

5 As Merry Wiesner-Hanks puts it, quoting
a colleague: “We used to do Dante’s life and
funktioniert, then with New Criticism we did ‘the
arbeiten,’ then with New Historicism we did
Dante’s works in their historical location,
then with post-structuralism we did Dante
and me, and now we just do me”; “Women,
Gender, and Church History,” Church Histo-
ry 71 (2002): 600–620, especially 600.

6 Dan Frank, “Symposium on Editing,” The
Three Penny Review 29 (1) (Frühling 2008): 16.

7 Lynn Hunt, “Democratization and Decline?
The Consequences of Demographic Change in
the Humanities,” in What’s Happened to the Hu-
manities? Hrsg. Kernan, 17–31.

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new topics.8 Such professional pres-
sures seem to me to constitute the real
threat we face, and some aspects of a
postmodern (insbesondere, deconstruc-
tiv) stance toward scholarship may
provide a partial defense against them.
I shall return to professional pressures
at the end of this essay. Erste, a consid-
eration of where the writing of history
is today.

The past three decades have seen a

number of discussions of the applica-
tion of what is known generically as
“theory” to historical scholarship.
With minor differences, they have told
the same story up to the late 1990s.9

8 Jonathan Beck, “After New Literary Histo-
ry and Theory? Notes on the mla Hit Parade
and the Currencies of Academic Exchange,”
New Literary Theory 26 (1995): 695–709, quot-
ed in Margery Sabin, “Evolution and Revolu-
tion: Change in the Literary Humanities, 1968–
1995,” in What’s Happened to the Humanities?
Hrsg. Kernan, 85.

9 Among many accounts I might cite, see John
E. Toews, “Intellectual History after the Lin-
guistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and
the Irreducibility of Experience,” The American
Historical Review 92 (4) (1987): 879–907; Victo-
ria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, Hrsg., Beyond the
Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of So-
ciety and Culture (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1999); Elizabeth A. Clark, Geschichte,
Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn
(Cambridge, Masse.: Harvard University Press,
2004); Joan W. Scott, “Against Eclecticism,”
in “Derrida’s Gift,” special issue, Unterschiede
16 (3) (Fallen 2005): 114–137; Joan W. Scott, “His-
tory-writing as critique,” in Manifestos for His-
tory, Hrsg. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun
Munslow (New York: Routledge, 2007), 19–38;
Peter Jelavich, “Cultural History,” in Transna-
tionale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theo-
rien, Hrsg. Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, Und
Oliver Janz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ru-
precht, 2006), 227–237; Gabrielle M. Spiegel,
Hrsg., Practicing History: New Directions in Histori-
cal Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York:

Social historians and sociologists have
tended to emphasize the rejection of,
or evolution beyond, Marxist history;
intellectual historians have tended to
lay more emphasis on literary and psy-
choanalytic criticism. But with remark-
able unanimity, they all begin the ac-
count with Saussure and the develop-
ment of semiotics, circa 1916, and un-
derstand the great shift of the late 1960s
to early 1980s as away from social hist-
ory (in both its Marxist and cliometric,
or quantitative, forms–the latter tout-
ed in the 1960s as the wave of the future)
and toward cultural history, influenced
both by French intellectuals, über alles
Foucault and Derrida, and American an-
thropologists, especially Clifford Geertz.
This cultural or linguistic, poststruc-

turalist or postmodern turn is usually
understood to hold that language does
not reflect the world but precedes it and
makes it intelligible by constructing it:
mit anderen Worten, there is no objective uni-
verse independent of language and no
transparent relationship between social
organization and individual self-under-
Stehen. Such awareness entails, für
Historiker, the realization that the cat-
egories and periods they use are exposi-
tory devices that need constant reformu-
lation exactly because they are always
based in political and social assumptions
that may, because inherited, be very hard
to detect. The past does not come in eco-
nomic, sozial, or military chunks, nor
in centuries; wars and renaissances, wie
“resistance” and “corruption,” are creat-
ed by historians, although aggression,
power, and creativity (which are not,

Routledge, 2005); Lisa M. Bitel, “Period Trou-
ble: The Impossibility of Teaching Feminist
Medieval History,” in Paradigms and Methods
in Early Medieval Studies, Hrsg. Celia Chazelle
and Felice Lifshitz (New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2007), 203–220.

Perspectives,
connections
& Objekte:
what’s
happening
in history
Jetzt?

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Caroline W.
Bynum
on the
humanities

Jedoch, encountered unmediated) Sind
nicht. Such awareness also entails the un-
derstanding that the past is not transpar-
ent to us; all evidence (whether manu-
script or inscription, fossilized pollen or
the light from a distant star) is mediated,
perceived and analyzed from the point
of view of a particular actor, instrument,
or interpreter. Hence the “something” a
postmodern historian encounters in re-
search–whether termed facts, Daten, ex-
perience, or meaning–is fragmentary,
heterogeneous, discontinuous, partial,
and always interpreted and interpret-
able.

Where these accounts of the so-called
linguistic turn have departed from each
other is in their descriptions of what
comes “beyond” it. Describing recent
fears that the linguistic turn, somewhat
illogically, both makes “culture” deter-
ministic (the world becomes a set of
symbols that determines individuals)
and yet deprives historians of an “ob-
jective” past (there is “no there there”
beyond the symbols), they depict and
seemingly applaud a turn to something
else. Aber was? Some think they see a
turn to narrative, even mega-narrative;
others see rather a retreat to microhis-
tory. Some cling to unmediated “expe-
rience”; others predict a “revitalized
and transformed . . . objectivity.”10 For
manche, what we have now is a material
turn–recourse to “the primacy of the
object.” For others, the new turn is psy-
chological.11 For yet others, the turn is

10 Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Marga-
ret Jacobs, Telling the Truth about History
(New York: Norton, 1994), 237.

11 See Patrick Joyce, Hrsg., The Social in Ques-
tion: New Bearings in History and the Social Sci-
zen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 14, sowie
as note 27 below. For what some might call a
psychological turn, see Rebecca Spang, “Para-

historisch, although at least one survey-
or of the contemporary scene treats the
linguistic turn itself, not the retreat from
Es, as a sort of historical turn.12

Probably the most common descrip-
tion of the retreat characterizes it as a
return to social history; but a number
hedge their bets by seeing it as a kind
of eclecticism of method, a “bricolage,”
or what Gabrielle Spiegel, in a recent
volume devoted to the turn from the
turn, calls “practice theory” (um
which designation she is noticeably un-
enthusiastic).13 It thus seems clear that,
for all the unease the theorists of theo-
ry articulate concerning certain under-
standings of where history was a de-
cade ago, there is in fact no new theory
of theory that has swept the ½eld–or
even commanded much attention from
professional historians. And this leads
me to a second point.

The amount of theorizing about theo-

ry–that is, descriptions of the linguis-
tic turn and what lies beyond it–is actu-
ally quite limited. A good deal of it has
been done by a small group of essayists,
many of whom are not practicing histo-
rians. In the volume Beyond the Cultural
Turn (1999), edited by a historian and
a sociologist, almost half of the essays
were written by sociologists, politisch
Wissenschaftler, or those with joint appoint-
ments in several of the social sciences.

digms and Paranoia: How Modern Is the
French Revolution?” review essay, Der
American Historical Review 108 (1) (2003):
119–147, especially 127–129.

12 Ronald Grigor Suny, “Back and Beyond:
Reversing the Cultural Turn?” in “Review
Essays: Beyond the Cultural Turn,” The
American Historical Review 107 (5) (2002):
1476–1499, especially 1482.

13 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, "Einführung,”
in Practicing History, Hrsg. Spiegel, 22–26.

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When the American Historical Review de-
voted a Forum essay in 2002 to a review
of the volume, it commissioned pieces
aus, jeweils, an anthropologist, A
political scientist, and a literary critic.
Practicing History: New Directions in Histor-
ical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (2005),
edited by Gabrielle Spiegel, is composed
of essays by four sociologists, four his-
torians, two anthropologists, and a pro-
fessor of English. (Several of the au-
thors, admirably, wear more than one
hat.) There is nothing particularly wor-
risome about those who are not profes-
sional historians theorizing history, von
course. As postmodernism would have
Es, a kaleidoscope of views can only help.
But one notes in reading these essays
that they often generalize about what
historians are doing, without giving
any examples of historical writing. Es
is hard to avoid the conclusion that arti-
cles about the turning and re-turning in
which historians are said currently to be
engaged may not be the best place to go
to see what’s happening in history.

I have thus decided to turn for evidence
to the last ten years of the American His-
torical Review (ahr), not only its articles,
review articles, and Forum discussions,
but also, to the extent possible, a sam-
ple of the books reviewed. One might
of course argue that the ahr, especially
under the leadership of Michael Gross-
berg, its editor from 1995–2005, was not
typical of the historical profession in the
Vereinigte Staaten, since the journal strove to
foster work the Association thought of
as broad-ranging, comparative, und in-
terdisciplinary, and also endeavored to
broaden its base of contributors in terms
of gender, ethnische Zugehörigkeit, ½eld studied, Und
type of institution represented. If one
is trying to discern what the new direc-
tions in scholarship are, this is not, Wie-
immer, a disadvantage.

A survey of recent work in the ahr

and elsewhere14 suggests to me that
much of the most subtle and energetic
recent historical writing has absorbed
what is thought-provoking and innova-
tive about the linguistic turn. Um sicher zu sein,
there is a certain amount of what one
might call labeling rather than leverag-
ing. We have all read too many pieces in
the last twenty years in which Geertz is
cited to convince us there is culture, oder
Foucault mentioned as if his point were
that everything reduces to power. Der
anxious decorating of footnotes with la-
bels is, Jedoch, nothing new; Max We-
ber, Zum Beispiel, used to be–and some-
times still is–cited at any mention of
bureaucracy or charisma. Darüber hinaus,
some recent articles may, to some tastes,
go on at unnecessary length about theo-
Ries, especially about theories not uti-
lized. dennoch, when one reads Priya
Satia on how the British understanding
of the area they knew as “Arabia” influ-
enced military policy in Iraq just after
World War I; Sarah Knott on the differ-
ently gendered ideals of “sensibility”
found on two sides of the Atlantic dur-
ing the Revolutionary War; Gadi Algazi
on rituals between medieval lords and
peasants that articulated mutual but
asymmetrical obligations, always ½l-
tered through remembering; or An-
drew Zimmerman on how an identity
constructed for peasants in German
Togo on the model of American self-
help became a trap, and not only be-

14 To The American Historical Review I add a
survey of recent issues of History and Theory
Und, Natürlich, my reading, a large part of it
written by Europeans, in my own ½eld of Eu-
ropean history. I am also influenced by my re-
view over the past ½ve years of an average of
three hundred applications a year for member-
ships in the School of Historical Studies at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

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connections
& Objekte:
what’s
happening
in history
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Caroline W.
Bynum
on the
humanities

cause of disregard of ecological condi-
tionen, one is in the presence of theorized
historical analysis in which lives, in their
suffering and their fullness, are glimpsed
through the always-fragmentary and in-
terpretable texts and objects that medi-
ate them to us.15 When one reads Brooke
Holmes on the ways in which ancient
Greek discussions of the symptoms of
illness take us into a place where a new
understanding was being formulated of
what it means to be in, and to be, a body,
one encounters historical writing that
delivers what, in my judgment, Geschichte
should always strive to do: tell us some-
thing of the difference between the past
and the present while remaining aware
that the present descends from the past
and that their differences cannot have
been so great as to render all our lan-
guage useless.16

In this writing, theory is not merely
present; it enables insights of sophis-

15 Priya Satia, “The Defense of Inhumanity:
Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia,”
The American Historical Review 111 (1) (2006):
16–51; Sarah Knott, “Sensibility and the Amer-
ican War for Independence,” The American
Historical Review 109 (1) (2004): 19–40; Gadi
Algazi, “Lords Ask, Peasants Answer: Making
Traditions in Late Medieval Village Assem-
blies,” in Between History and Histories: Der
Making of Silence and Commemoration, Hrsg. Ger-
ald Sider and Gavin Smith (Toronto: Univer-
sity of Toronto Press, 1997), 199–229; Und
Andrew Zimmerman, “A German Alabama
in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to Ger-
man Togo and the Transnational Origins of
West African Cotton Growers,” The American
Historical Review 110 (5) (2005): 1362–1398.

16 Brooke Holmes, “Medical Analogy and
Ethical Subjectivity in Plato,” in When Worlds
Elide, Hrsg. J. P. Euben and Karen Bassi (Lan-
ham, Md.: Rowman & Little½eld, forthcom-
ing), and “Medical Knowledge and Technol-
Ogy,” in A Cultural History of the Human Body,
Volumen 1: Ancient Greece to Early Christianity,
Hrsg. Daniel H. Garrison (Oxford: Berg Pub-
lishers, bevorstehend).

tication and subtlety, and its authors
tell us quite explicitly how it does this.
Such work seems to me both more
grounded in the evidence it explores
and more nuanced in its understanding
of genre, symbol, and idea than some
of the sterile opposing of text to experi-
ence that characterized the early 1990s.
In my own area of medieval religious
Geschichte, Zum Beispiel, the previous two
decades saw futile and sometimes acri-
monious debate by German scholars
about whether women “really” saw vi-
sions or scribes simply “made up” vi-
sionary accounts because the genre ex-
pected them; in contrast, recent work,
such as that of Dyan Elliott, Nancy Caci-
ola, and Barbara Newman, understands,
without needing to belabor the point,
that scholars have no direct access to
the experience of visionaries, but that
the presence of expectations of their be-
havior on the part of those, male and fe-
männlich, who wrote about them is evidence
about their lives and not merely an op-
portunity for us to read and interpret.17
Es gibt, to be sure, both new em-
phases and new buzz words, and these
can be understood in part as a response
Zu, even a departure from, some of the
scholarship inspired by the linguistic
turn. Explorations, and assertions, von
agency–a buzz word very popular in
article titles over the past two decades
–are reactions to a fear that analysis
of the constituents of culture eclipses

17 Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine
and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003);
Dyan Elliott, Proving Women: Female Spiri-
tuality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later
Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2004); Barbara Newman, “What
Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash be-
tween Theory and Practice in Medieval
Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 (1) (2005):
1–43.

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individual action and responsibility.18
A recent tendency to talk of transitions
rather than epistemes or paradigm shifts
reflects a determination to pay more at-
tention to how cultures move from one
set of dominant symbols to another–in
other words, to what is always for a his-
torian the fundamental challenge: ex-
plaining change. Darüber hinaus, recent his-
torical writing is clearly going in some
directions that seem to be reactions to,
even implicit rejections of, a cultural or
linguistic turn. I now consider some of
them–without, Jedoch, vorschlagen
that any is truly “beyond” the cultural.

There are two very different ways in

which historical work of the last decade
may be seen as a retreat from the tex-
tual: the renewed interest in material
culture and physical objects, auf dem einen
Hand, Und, auf dem anderen, a new enthusi-
asm for what one might call deep struc-
tures, represented both by an upsurge of
so-called “big” or “deep” history and by
a renewed recourse to sociobiological
and cognitive explanations for human
behavior. To take the latter ½rst, Dort
has recently been a flurry of interest in
what one might call “really big” or “real-
ly long” history, some of which attempts
to trump mere “world history” by going
all the way back to the big bang.19 Dan-

18 See Spiegel, "Einführung,” in Practicing
Geschichte, Hrsg. Spiegel, 11–18. One should also
note that some now see agency as the impor-
tation of constraining nineteenth-century lib-
eral categories; Cornelia Hughes Dayton,
“Rethinking Agency, Recovering Voices,”
The American Historical Review 109 (3) (2004):
827–843. Rebecca J. Scott, “Small-Scale Dy-
namics of Large-Scale Processes,” in “ahr
Forum: Crossing Slavery’s Boundaries,” The
American Historical Review 105 (2) (2000):
473, dubs the concept “a little shop-worn.”

19 Fred Spier, The Structure of Big History from
the Big Bang until Today (Amsterdam: Amster-

iel Lord Smail, in a recent ahrarticle,
Zum Beispiel, proposed taking the sto-
ry of human origins back to the emer-
gence of homo sapiens in Africa rather
than to the emergence of writing in
Mesopotamia, his argument being that
the latter narrative instantiates a Judeo-
Christian perspective on world histo-
ry.20 David Christian and Fred Spier
tout even bigger history. Even if it does
not place the roots of history in astro-
nomical events, such interpretation
sees the evolution and extinction of
Spezies, the drift of continents, climate
ändern, volcanic eruptions, und Krankheit
as more important for understanding
the course of human development than
short-term events such as wars, treaties,
or elections; as such it not only provides
a provocative counter to traditional po-
litical narratives, but also ascribes gen-
uinely new causes for events historians
thought they had long understood.21

dam University Press, 1996); David Chris-
tian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big His-
tory (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004); Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History
and the Brain (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2008). See also “The Return of
Wissenschaft: Evolutionary Ideas and History,”
special issue, History and Theory 38 (1999),
and Gale Stokes, “The Fate of Human Soci-
ethisch: A Review of Recent Macrohistories,”
The American Historical Review 106 (2) (2001):
508–525.

20 Dan Smail, “In the Grip of Sacred His-
tory,” The American Historical Review 110 (5)
(2005): 1337–1361.

21 Zum Beispiel, Michael McCormick, “Rats,
Communications and Plague: Toward an An-
cient and Medieval Ecological History,” Jour-
nal of Interdisciplinary History 34 (1) (2003):
1–25, and Michael McCormick, Paul Edward
Dutton, and Paul Mayewski, “Volcanoes and
the Climate Forcing of Carolingian Europe,
A.D. 750–950,” Speculum 82 (4) (2007): 865–
895.

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Caroline W.
Bynum
on the
humanities

Although such arguments need not
–and sometimes do not–draw on deep-
ly embedded psychological, evolution-
Und, cognitive, or sociobiological struc-
tures, they tend to, in part because their
accounts frequently rely on repeated
historical patterns or have recourse to
claims about perduring “human nature.”
One sees this in a book such as Robert
McElvaine’s Eve’s Seed or even the recent
work of Jared Diamond.22 Art historians
have been particularly interested in such
explanations, whether in the more psy-
chologically reductive work of John Oni-
ans, which applies neurobiology to art-
making and viewing, or in the more an-
thropological work of Hans Belting and
David Freedberg, which is attempting to
tease out non-reductive ways of under-
standing cross-cultural human respons-
es to the “power of images.”23 Scholars
at work in the relatively new ½eld of the
history of the emotions–although they
tend to reject theories of universal psy-
chobiological processes which emotion-
words reflect–are nonetheless drawn
to cognitive science and brain studies,

22 Robert S. McElvaine, Eve’s Seed: Biology,
the Sexes, and the Course of History (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 2001); Jared M. Diamond, Waffen,
Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(New York: Norton, 2005). For an argument
against the invasion of literary studies by cog-
nitive and neuroscience, see Raymond Tallis,
“License my roving hands: Does neuroscience
really have anything to teach us about the plea-
sure of reading John Donne?” Commentary,
The Times Literary Supplement, April 11, 2008.

23 John Onians, Neuroarthistory: From Aristot-
le and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007); Hans Belting, Bild-
Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft
(München: W. Fink, 2001); David Freedberg and
Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empa-
thy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive
Wissenschaft 11 (5) (2007): 197–203. For reservations,
see Robert Suckale’s review of Belting in Journal
für Kunstgeschichte 11 (4) (2007): 351–360.

arguing that there is something bodily
as well as verbal in more than one cul-
ture to which the word anger, for exam-
Bitte, applies.24

Searching for deep structures and large

patterns seems located at the opposite
pole from the postmodern sense of his-
tory-writing as fragmentary, fragile, Und,
so to speak, under perpetual construc-
tion. dennoch, in the hands of most
professional historians, even cognitive
science and parallels from the older ½eld
of ethology (animal behavior) tend to
be used analogously rather than reduc-
aktiv. When Rachel Fulton, for exam-
Bitte, understands premodern prayer prac-
tice through theories of psychological
response and employs parallels between
present-day sports and medieval meta-
phors of spiritual combat, she does not
reduce the rituals and experiences we
½nd described in texts to physiological
patterns in the brain, just as she does not
argue that we have any access to the de-
votee’s inner feelings. Cognitive struc-
tures lie deep below and hence are ac-
cessed only through behaviors that dif-
fer culturally; analogies are exactly that:
analogies not equations.25 Even “deep
history” at its best involves understand-
ing that physical or physiological struc-
tures are always mediated through our
ways of knowing them, and hence
through culture.

A far more pervasive trend–the in-
terest in objects–might also be under-

24 See the sophisticated effort to deal with
these issues in William I. Müller, Humiliation
and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort
and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1993), 12–13, and also in Barbara Rosenwein,
Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

25 Rachel Fulton, “Praying with Anselm at
Admont: A Meditation on Practice,” Specu-
lum 81 (3) (2006): 700–733.

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stood as a flight from postmodern tex-
tuality. Material culture, understood as
archaeology, has of course been a major
element in historical scholarship for al-
most two centuries, especially for ar-
eas of history such as the classics, Die
ancient Near East, early China, oder
meso-America, for all of which textual
evidence is scanty or lacking. Since the
1970S, Jedoch, it has not only become
more important in ½elds such as the
European Middle Ages, for which it
was formerly less used, but has also
expanded signi½cantly beyond the ex-
cavation and dating of human-made
objects to the use of new techniques
and the posing of more wide-ranging
cultural questions.26 Dendrochronol-
Ogy, Zum Beispiel, is now used to date
architecture and devotional objects
as well as settlement locations; zooar-
chaeological evidence sheds new light
on diet (animal and human) and hence
on the movement of peoples; Analyse
of glacial ice to determine mineralogi-
cal emissions at far distant sites reveals
new facts about mining techniques and
hence radically new conclusions about
the technological sophistication of cul-
tures whose texts talk little about tech-
nology.

Material culture has also come to in-
clude museum studies, as it does in Ran-
dolph Starn’s ahrreview essay of 2005,
or areas such as the history of fashion or
domestic interiors, often previously un-
derstood as social history. Sehen, for exam-
Bitte, Leora Auslander’s 2005 Artikel, “Be-
yond Words.” To both Auslander and
Starn, objects are understood as having

26 For examples of innovative work in ar-
chaeology, see the many works of Colin Ren-
frew, as well as Stanley H. Ambrose and M.
Anne Katzenberg, Hrsg., Biogeochemical Ap-
proaches to Paleodietary Analysis (New York:
Academic Kluwer/Plenum Press, 2000).

their own “agency,” so to speak; an iron
or a typewriter, Zum Beispiel, shapes the
roles and experiences of the woman who
uses it even as her needs and desires
(and the needs and desires of others
thrust upon her) shape its creation and
use.27 Indeed both authors tend to op-
pose the material to the cultural. Starn
writes, “It is quite possible to imagine
some future version of this Brief Guide
suggesting that museum studies had
turned–or returned–from the primacy
of discourse to the priority of object.”28
dennoch, it is hard not to notice that
the extended example of material cul-
ture Auslander gives–a discussion of the
reconstitution of domestic interiors by
Jewish survivors after the Holocaust–is
based on inventories, das ist, on texts.
Darüber hinaus, as both historians recog-
nize, objects are hardly objective. Nei-
ther the statue revered as living by a
fourteenth-century peasant, nor the
table polished by a nineteenth-centu-
ry housewife, exists before the viewer
as raw material from the past. Not on-
ly do we tend to understand that they
are signi½cant and why they are sig-
ni½cant from texts, Aber, whether or not
they are textually framed, they are not
the same stuff they were centuries be-

27 Randolph Starn, “A Historian’s Brief Guide
to New Museum Studies,” The American Histori-
cal Review 110 (1) (2005): 68–96; Leora Auslan-
der, “Beyond Words,” The American Historical
Rezension 110 (4) (2005): 1015–1045. On the agen-
cy of objects, see Daniel Miller, “Materiality:
An Introduction,” in Materiality, Hrsg. Daniel
Müller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005),
1–50; Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropo-
logical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998);
Lorraine Daston, Hrsg., Things That Talk: Object
Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone
Books, 2004); and the many works of Bruno
Latour.

28 Starn, “A Historian’s Brief Guide to New
Museum Studies,” 84.

Perspectives,
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& Objekte:
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Caroline W.
Bynum
on the
humanities

Vordergrund: paint is painted over; varnish de-
teriorates and changes color; Objekte
(like documents) are forged, reused,
and misused.29 Despite Auslander’s
title “Beyond Words” or Starn’s claim
to return to the priority of objects, diese
essays show not so much a move beyond
Kultur, Diskurs, or textuality as what
one might call a move beyond binaries
–to a sense of both text and object as al-
ways interpreted and interpretable be-
cause they are always imbedded in cul-
tur. The study of “the material” is not,
it turns out, beyond the cultural turn.

If we look at what today’s historians

are actually doing, we ½nd that in addi-
tion to what is sometimes claimed to
be a retreat from the textual, there is an-
other major and multifaceted move that
may at ½rst glance seem “beyond” the
postmodern. This is the move to stress
connections and transitions rather than
borders, boundaries, and breaks.

One might, vielleicht, put under the
rubric of “connections and inclusions
rather than boundaries” the tendency
of today’s scholarship to treat what are
known as “identity groups” not as ra-
cially or genetically given but as con-
stituted by complex cultural circum-
stances. The focus is apparent not only
in the titles of recent publications, Aber
also in the many courses on, for exam-
Bitte, gender studies, gay and lesbian
Studien, ethnic studies, and postcolo-
nial studies offered in university curric-
ula. To mention only a single example:
recently there has been much sophis-
ticated work on ethnogenesis–work
welche, at least sometimes, asks wheth-
er ethnicity is an appropriate category

29 For astute comments, see Tim Ingold, „Mama-
terials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dia-
logues 14 (1) (2007): 1–16.

Dædalus Winter 2009

at all for premodern history.30 Such new
emphases are an obvious and welcome
consequence of the turns of the 1980s
and 1990s; there is no need for me to un-
derline them here. What I mean by con-
nections and transitions are two trends
that are somewhat less apparent, if only
because a little more recent.

Noch einmal, I take the second (Die
stress on transitions) ½rst. Recent his-
torical work can be seen, in some ways,
as a retreat from poststructuralist em-
phasis on paradigm shifts or epistemes
–that is, on periods understood to have
characteristic cultural con½gurations,
an escape or even transition from which
may be hard to discern or explain. Eins
result of such supposed retreat is an atti-
tude we might tag, only slightly in jest,
“nothing declines.” Current scholarship
tends not only to be drawn to classic pe-
riods of collapse and deterioration–the
end (once the “fall”) of the Roman em-
pire now understood as late antiquity or
“the birth of Europe,” for example–but
also to ½nd within such periods both a
creativity of their own and the origins of
new cultural con½gurations. Byzantine
culture of the middle period, the Otto-
man empire in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, meso-America just be-
fore the coming of the Spaniards, spät
Qing dynasty China, the European Dark
Ages (a designation once understood to
refer to the seventh to ninth centuries,

30 Florin Curta, “Some Remarks on Ethnicity
in Medieval Archaeology,” Early Medieval Europe
15 (2) (2007): 159–185. Similar questions are,
Natürlich, asked about race and sexual orien-
Station: see Barbara J. Fields, “Of Rogues and
Geldings,” in “ahr Forum: Amalgamation
and the Historical Distinctiveness of the Unit-
ed Staaten,” The American Historical Review 108
(5) (2003): 1397–1405; and Ruth Mazo Karras,
“Active/Passive, Acts/Passions: Greek and Ro-
man Sexualities,” review essay, The American
Historical Review 105 (4) (2000): 1250–1265.

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then shifted to the tenth and eleventh
centuries, now run off the stage entire-
ly): such periods are often analyzed to
½nd creativity percolating under a sur-
face appearance of stagnation.31 More-
über, the existence of radical and abrupt
shifts in values, cultural forms, social ar-
rangements, and political power tends to
be suspect to today’s historians; “revolu-
tions” are denied across a wide swatch
of history. Not only political revolutions,
such as the French and American, or re-
ligious upheavals, such as “the Reforma-
tion(S) of the sixteenth century,” but
also cultural breakthroughs, such as the
scienti½c revolution, or social and mili-
tary recon½gurations, such as the feudal
Revolution, are vigorously questioned by
a large body of current historical analy-
sis.32 Several recent articles on topics
ranging from plague in fourteenth-cen-
tury Europe to the breakup of the Soviet
Union assert in their titles the end of
paradigms.33

31 For one example, see Joanna Waley-Cohen,
“The New Qing History,” Radical History Review
88 (Winter 2004): 193–206.

32 Sehen, Zum Beispiel, Spang, “Paradigms and
Paranoia”; Thomas N. Bisson, “The Feudal
Revolution,” Past and Present 142 (1994): 6–
42, with responses by Dominique Barthéle-
Mein, Stephen D. White, Timothy Reuter,
and Chris Wickham in Past and Present 152
(1996): 196–223, Und 155 (1997): 177–225;
Margaret J. Osler, Hrsg., Rethinking the Scienti½c
Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Drücken Sie, 2000), and Stephen Gaukroger, Emer-
gence of a Scienti½c Culture: Science and the Shap-
ing of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 2006). A related example is Charles
S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Centu-
ry to History: Alternative Narratives for the
Modern Era,” The American Historical Review
105 (3) (2000): 807–831, which rejects the
twentieth century as a natural unit.

33 Zum Beispiel, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., “The
Black Death: End of a Paradigm,” The Ameri-

Driven by many impulses and circum-
stances, such a new interpretative focus
clearly owes something to discontent
with what is perceived to be a postmod-
ern sense of the fragmentary and discon-
tinuous, as well as what is perceived to
be a poststructuralist understanding of
discourse as a set of cultural symbols
and practices so powerful that change
within them is dif½cult to conceptualize
or account for. At a deeper level, howev-
er, analyses that stress transition rather
than rupture draw on many postmodern
techniques for tracing the genealogy
of concepts, institutions, attitudes, als-
sumptions, and actions. Zum Beispiel,
what it means for a text to be “new” or
a ritual to be “traditional” has become
a far more complex question now that
Genre, audience, the circumstances of
composition or transcription, und das
complexities of reception (einschließlich
long-term reception) are understood
to be intrinsic to discourse.34 Rather
than a retreat from the poststructural,
the current tendency to stress transi-
tion, continuation, cultural borrowing,
and the construction of identities and
paradigms by the historians who em-
ploy them is at least as much an extrap-
olation from the theoretical moves of
the 1980s and 1990s as an effort to over-
come the limitations of those moves.

can Historical Review 107 (3) (2002): 703–738;
Mark von Hagen, “Empires, Borderlands and
Diasporas: Eurasia as Anti-Paradigm for the
Post-Soviet Era,” The American Historical Re-
view 109 (2) (2004): 445–468.

34 Sehen, Zum Beispiel, Daniel Hobbins, “The
Schoolman as Public Intellectual: Jean Ger-
son and the Late Medieval Tract,” The Amer-
ican Historical Review 108 (5) (2003): 1308–
1337; Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Sei-
tween Early Medieval Texts and Social Scienti½c
Theory (Princeton: Princeton University
Drücken Sie, 2001).

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Caroline W.
Bynum
on the
humanities

When one surveys recent ahrarticles,

the books on new acquisitions shelves
in scholarly libraries, and the job adver-
tisements in The American Historical
Association’s Perspectives, the most strik-
ing contemporary emphasis is on what I
am calling connections, described in 2006
by C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Isabel Hof-
meyr, and others as “movement, flow,
circulation” and as long ago as 1999 In
the Journal of American History as “trans-
national” currents.35 The most graphic
illustration of this might appear to be
the recent trend toward study of bodies
of water as connecting, rather than land
masses as sites of boundaries and divi-
sion (geographical as well as political):
the Mediterranean history, North Atlan-
tic history, Paci½c Rim history, Indian
Ocean history, and South China Sea his-
tory, Zum Beispiel, surveyed in a recent
issue of the ahrunder the title “Oceans

35 C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Con-
nelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Pa-
tricia Seed, “ahr Conversation: On Trans-
national History,” The American Historical Re-
view 111 (5) (2006): 1441–1464. Der Umzug
has been from histories devoted to explain-
ing Western exceptionalism (Zum Beispiel,
David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Na-
tionen: Why Some are so Rich and Some so Poor
[New York: Norton, 1998]; Alfred W. Cros-
von, The Measure of Reality: Quanti½cation and
Western Society, 1250–1600 [Cambridge: Nocken-
bridge University Press, 1997]) to a compar-
ative world history approach (R. Bin Wong,
China Transformed: Historical Change and the
Limits of European Experience [Ithaca: Cornell
Universitätsverlag, 1997]; Kenneth Pomeranz,
The Great Divergence: Europa, China and the
Making of the Modern World Economy [Prince-
Tonne: Princeton University Press, 2000]) to so-
called transnational history, which stresses
what I call here (following Horden and Pur-
cell) Konnektivität. See also “ahr Forum:
Oceans of History,” The American Historical
Rezension 111 (3) (2006): 717–780 and two spe-
cial issues of The Journal of American History
on transnational history, 86 (2-3) (1999).

of History.”36 But the trend cuts deeper.
For even land masses are, in current re-
suchen, treated as sites of connectivity
and mutual influence. Rather than the
older world history or global history, un-
derstood as a comparison of given units
(whether regions, nation-states, or em-
pires), the new emphasis on connectivi-
ty, which one recent symposium percep-
tively labeled entanglement, seeks places
below the surface of borders and bound-
aries where economic and cultural con-
nections and mutual influences flour-
ish. Welcomed by some as an end to the
area-studies mentality,37 such work em-
phasizes diasporas, mobility, Diversität,
cultural borrowing, and the porousness
of borders, and as such, clearly owes
something to an actual opening up of
boundaries since the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the opening of China (Wie-
ever partial) to the West.

Although any new emphasis tends,
alas, to bring with it its own buzz words,
the stress on connectivity at its best (als
in Mark von Hagen’s 2004 article on
Eurasia as “anti-paradigm”) is an effort
to break down tenacious older dichoto-

36 In this regard, Peregrine Horden and Nich-
olas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Med-
iterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000)
–a critique of Fernand Braudel, The Mediterra-
nean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of
Philip II, 2 vols., trans. S. Reynolds (London:
Collins, 1972–1973) that owes much to it–
has been powerfully influential. So much is
this the case that there is now a project at
the University of Munich on “the East Asian
‘Mediterranean,’” sponsored by the Volkswa-
gen Foundation and directed by Dr. Angela
Scottenhammer.

37 See Gregory Mann, “Locating Colonial His-
tories: Between France and West Africa,” The
American Historical Review 110 (2) (2005): 409–
434, and xv for the editor’s comment on that
essay. And see “ahr Forum: Entangled Em-
pires in the Atlantic World,” The American
Historical Review 112 (3) (2007): 710–799.

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mies, such as Occident (in this case Rus-
sia) versus Orient. As Matthew Connelly
Kommentare, „[B]inaries are on the run,”
a trend all the more surprising (yet per-
haps, for academic culture, predictable)
given the stark dichotomies in the polit-
ical and polemical world since 9/11.38
For all its broad sweep, its rejection of
abrupt shifts, and its stress on economic
and geographical factors–which might
seem anti- or non-postmodern–the
new “entangled” history is inconceiv-
able without a postmodern understand-
ing that all units (whether geographical
or cultural), like all exchanges (ob
of values, social structures, Objekte, oder
dna), are mediated by categories consti-
tuted by the historians who study them,
as well as by the people who create them
in their ever-changing variety. Daher,
in the new emphases I have chronicled
here–on connectivity, transitions, ma-
terial culture, Objekte, even in the best
of the work that employs and queries
“deep structures”–there seems to be
a recognition that, pace the theorists
of “turns,” for the historian there can
be no “beyond” culture.39
Somit, as I said at the beginning of

this essay, the apocalyptic tone of the
mid-1990s seems to have been mis-
placed. The writing of history is stron-
ger and far more sophisticated than in
1995 Und, as I have tried to show, Das
owes more to the absorption than to
the rejecting of the so-called linguistic
or cultural turn. Yet those of us who
teach in American universities know
that there is a crisis today. It is a crisis

38 Matthew Connelly, in “ahr Conversation:
On Transnational History,” 1452.

39 As Richard Handler argues in “Cultural The-
ory in History Today,” in “Review Essays: Sei-
yond the Cultural Turn,” The American Histori-
cal Review 107 (5) (2002): 1513–1520.

not of the substance of historical and
humanistic study, but rather of profes-
sional practice and formation, a crisis
that goes to the heart of what we value
as scholars at least as much as did the
“culture wars” of the 1990s. It affects
all practicing historians, but especial-
ly the young, and tends to be expressed
in language similar to the cries of anxi-
ety, even fear, that characterized the es-
says in the 1997 volume What’s Happened
to the Humanities? In der Tat, there is no ex-
aggeration involved in applying terms
such as alarm and despair to the attitudes
of PhD recipients currently emerging
onto the job market and to the approach
of their mentors and professors. Stories
abound of graduate students who fail
to ½nd jobs because their topics are not
“trendy,” of books that fail to ½nd pub-
lishers because of “the decline of the
monograph,” of assistant professors
who fail to gain tenure because they do
not complete that ominously titled “sec-
ond project.” Mentors respond with ex-
hortations to the young to produce ever
more rapidly, while purveying alarmist
tales of decreasing venues for publica-
tion and proliferating barriers to career
advancement. The apocalyptic has grav-
itated, es scheint, from the scholarly to
the professional sphere.

Although statistics are notoriously
useless in quelling fear, it is worth not-
ing that statistics do not bear out such
apocalyptic descriptions. As recent re-
ports on publishing conclude, the mono-
graph is still the key to humanities pub-
lishing; there has even been a modest
increase in history publishing in the
past few years, with a minimal increase
in price.40 New journals are constantly
appearing, and e-publishing provides

40 Humanities Indicators Prototype, http://
www.humanitiesindicators.org/content
/hrcoIVD.aspx#topIV12: Part IV. Indicator IV-

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Caroline W.
Bynum
on the
humanities

many new outlets. Despite a disturbing
increase in the number of people in ad-
junct or part-time positions who would
prefer full-time employment, und ein
alarming tendency for women to suffer
salary discrimination at later points in
their careers and at elite institutions, Die
market for entering professionals looks
good. About seven hundred PhD recip-
ients gain jobs in history departments
jedes Jahr; most candidates in tenure-
track positions acquire tenure; und das
proportion of recently tenured histori-
ans who have published books is very
high.41

The fear that lurks behind the scare
stories propagated by graduate students
and assistant professors to each other
rests less in demonstrable trends than
in rumors; but it rests above all in pres-
sure to publish at an increasing rate in-
flicted on younger professionals by
deans, department chairs, tenure com-
mittees, and senior colleagues. Pushed
to speed up production beyond what is
humanly possible and in ways that have
the potential to injure scholarly excel-

12: Academic Publishing (American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, 2008). And see Patrick
Manning, “Gutenberg-e: Electronic Entry to
the Historical Professoriate,” The American
Historical Review 109 (5) (2004): 1505–1526,
for a somewhat less positive assessment.

41 See Manning, “Gutenberg-e,” 1513; Thom-
as Bender et al., The Education of Historians for
the Twenty-First Century (Urbana: Published
for the American Historical Association by
the University of Illinois Press, 2004), 27;
Robert Townsend, “History and the Future
of Scholarly Publishing,” Perspectives 41 (7)
(2003); Francis Oakley, “Ignorant Armies
and Nighttime Clashes: Changes in the Hu-
manities Classroom, 1970–1995,” in What’s
Happened to the Humanities?, 67; and Human-
ities Indicators Prototype, http://www
.humanitiesindicators.org/content/hrcoIII
.aspx: Part III. The Humanities Workforce.

lence, even scholarly integrity, viele
candidates for tenure publish every
chapter of their ½rst monograph as a
journal article, scramble to orchestrate
an edited volume, to which all their
friends contribute, in order to have a
“second book” fast, and choose new
research topics of a reach and appar-
ently contemporary relevance that
they are not fully equipped to pursue.
Darüber hinaus, the pressures creep, insidi-
ously and steadily, up the professional
ladder to affect even tenured and mid-
career professors. Frenzy for produc-
tion then leads to a duplication of pub-
lishing that wastes paper; a frantic
search for sellable, often trendy, Und
sometimes overly general topics that
will be snatched up by publishers; Und,
most dangerously, to a deferral of cre-
Aktivität. For such frenzy defers the time
necessary for ½nding genuinely new
(and by de½nition un-trendy) topics,
for editing long and hitherto unknown
texts, for returning to the archives for
research radically different from one’s
earlier forays there, for the painful re-
writing and rethinking necessary for
true innovation; it may postpone dis-
covery and intellectual adventure so
long that historians no longer remem-
ber the courage and curiosity that moti-
vated their vocations in the ½rst place.

I have no facile or immediate solution
to such pressures, rumors, and fears. Aber
since the problem appears to lie less in
impersonal market factors than in the
culture of the academy, I propose that
what we need above all is a new under-
standing of what we are about as histo-
rians. To describe such an understand-
ing is not, Natürlich, to list a set of con-
crete proposals. But to outline propos-
als would be to write another essay
and might in any case contribute to the
impression, which I am attempting to
counter (at least for the United States)

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that current professional anxieties are
owing primarily to economic or insti-
tutional forces.42 Instead, I hope that
articulating a new self-understanding
will encourage all historians, but espe-
cially the young (and their mentors on
their behalf ), to resist both the rumors
of alarm and the pressures of speed-up.
And I suggest that embracing this self-
understanding will be easier for all of
us if we note that it is based in where
we actually are in the substance of our
work as scholars.

Hence I propose that we adopt to-
ward professional practices the same
postmodern stance that has facilitated
creative new work in the substance of
our scholarship. For if we could really
understand what we undertake as his-
torians to be by de½nition partial and
discontinuous, forever redone and in
need of redoing because of our own
cultural situated-ness, we–all of us,
young scholars and old–would be able
to slow down. If there is no goal at the
end of the race–that is, if the point is
the running not the goal–why sprint
instead of stroll (especially if sprinting
damages our knees forever)? No longer
pressured to read everything, consider
alles, account for every new turn
and twist of scholarship, we would rec-
ognize that each of us is–and can be–
only one perspective. Accepting the frag-
mentary and necessarily partial nature
of our own contribution, we might be-
come more truly collaborative–that is,
more open to using, even seeking out,
work different from our own. Stattdessen

of scrambling to compile ever more col-
lections of essays on predictable topics
in some false hope of “covering” a top-
ic, or commissioning essays from differ-
ent ½elds that talk past each other while
claiming an “interdisciplinarity” that
fails to recognize the radically different
languages and techniques necessary
from one expertise to another, we might
relax into true collaboration, welches ist
above all predicated on listening.

I do not mean by this to extol simply

the recognition that historical interpre-
tations are forever remade as genera-
tions change; historians have known
that for a long time. Nor do I mean sim-
ply to point out that our accounts are
konstruiert. I mean something more
radical and more postmodern–some-
thing I have elsewhere called “history
in the comic mode.”43 I propose a rec-
ognition that every stance is by de½ni-
tion on the margins, that every story
or analysis has of necessity an arbitrari-
ly imposed ending or conclusion, Das
there can be no so-called meta-narra-
tiv (das ist, a narrative for something
simply referred to as “us”), but that
there is no shame in any choice of sub-
ject, as long as it is made with method-
ological self-awareness and attention
to a range of relevant evidence, none
of it treated as transparent.

After all, it will probably always be
true that one person’s buzz word is an-
other person’s discovery; one person’s
“over-theorizing” is another person’s
methodological self-scrutiny; one per-
son’s “under-theorizing” is another’s

42 To say this is not to deny the deleterious ef-
fects that government-imposed standards and
requirements can have. An example is the ac-
ademic assessment procedures imposed in the
Großbritannien. Awareness of such pressures,
Jedoch, makes it all the more important that
scholars resist rather than exaggerate or collude
with them.

43 Caroline Walker Bynum, “In Praise of
Fragments: History in the Comic Mode," In
Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays
on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Reli-
gion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 11–26.
See also Bynum, “The P Word,” Perspectives
45 (7) (2007): 58.

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Caroline W.
Bynum
on the
humanities

archival research. But awareness that
we all write from a particular perspec-
tive and with the aid of speci½c meth-
ods and interpretations does not mean
that there is no difference between good
and bad arguments; opposing the trans-
parency of evidence–whether objects
or texts–does not mean opposing evi-
dence. In der Tat, exactly the opposite is
true. More attention to the complex
and indirect ways in which evidence
renders up the past leads to more at-
tention to the cogency and accuracy of
Streit. But paying more attention
means taking more time. What I sug-
gest is that an enthusiastic acceptance
(instead of a grim fear) that each of us
writes from a partial perspective might
free us from the pressures of speed-
up and over-production. Hence an ac-
ceptance of our postmodern partiality
might accord us more time to make our
partial arguments well.

If I am right in this seemingly odd vi-

sion that connects the postmodern to
the modest, then a recognition that we
are not beyond the cultural turn might
lead us not only to embrace fully the
achievements of the past decade but also
free new generations from pressures that
may inhibit the achievements of the de-
cades to come.

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