This exploratory essay seeks to unravel the inherent contradictions between two fundamental trends in contemporary historiography: the “spatial turn” on the one hand, and the “linguistic turn” on the other hand. The “spatial turn,” it argues, turned “space's” status as a category of analysis into an accepted dogma. Under these circumstances, one often overlooks the fact that “space,” like all concepts, can also be problematic and at times even misleading. By looking at several examples from and about the intellectual world of early modern Europe, the article demonstrates how the use of space as a category of analysis encounters two fundamental challenges. First, the problem of the absence of the word “space” itself from important early modern texts (“shrinkage”); and second, the overuse of the term “space” in translations and analysis of early modern intellectual works (“contamination”).
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Between the Linguistic and the Spatial Turns
A Reconsideration of the Concept of Space and Its Role in the Early Modern Period
Yair Mintzker
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2009
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 37–51 (15 total)
The Terror of their Enemies
Reflections on a Trope in Eighteenth-Century Historiography
Ronald Schechter
This article attempts to explain the appeal of "terror" in the French Revolution by examining the history of the concept of terror. It focuses on historiographical representations of sovereign powers, whether monarchs or nations, as "terrors" of their enemies. It argues that the term typically connoted majesty, glory, justice and hence legitimacy. Moreover, historiographical depictions of past rulers and nations frequently emphasized the transiency of terror as an attribute of power; they dramatized decline in formulations such as "once terrible." For the revolutionaries, terror therefore provided a means of legitimation, but one that always had to be guarded and reinforced.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2010
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 53–75 (23 total)
Introduction
The Social Life of Contentious Concepts
Ronald S. Stade
style and equivalent tropes in today’s right-wing rhetoric. I think it is therefore reasonable to speak of contemporary right-wing radicalism as Fascism 2.0. 2 Koselleck is associated with the school of Begriffsgeschichte; Skinner together with J