A few days ago I promised a blog post on historiography. Here's a few things to take note of before we get seriously started on that topic:
1. Historiography is essentially the history of History (the subject), concentrating on the evolving philosophies/methodologies of Historical study up to and including the present day.
2. It is not at all a universalistic subject. Western historiography traces a path from the histories of ancient Greece through Roman and (early) Christian historiography to the development of modern historiographical principles in the early 19th century, spurred on not least by the German historian Leopold von Ranke and his transposition of philological methodologies into History. The effects of cultural imperialism mean that Western historiographical methodology is the dominant form, but substantially different forms from other cultures still exist. Different methods of Historiography therefore depend on the cultural/idealistic backgrounds of the writers. The philosophical/theological/cultural backgrounds of writers cannot be divorced from the historiographical style they chose, especially as it will influence their epistemological methodologies as well as their creative ones.
3. Yes, I am deliberately choosing long words for this post.
4. Very broadly speaking, Historiography can be divided into the Traditional, Modernist and Post-Modernist schools, depending on one's attitudes to primary source material. The division I'm suggesting here is between the Traditional and Modernist (that primary source material is in itself inherently reliable) and the Post-Modern (that primary source material is not inherently, or indeed at all, reliable), although an equally useful division could be between the Traditional (concentration on higher politics and 'events', conservative style of communication) and the Modernist/Post-Modernist (imaginative styles of communication, tendency to concentrate on social history). The only constant when grouping together various histories is that it is very difficult to divide them all into exact groups.
5. I've only been studying this for a year, so please don't take anything I say as gospel.
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