A chronographer, translated literally, means a time-writer. As historians we all rely on the work of chronographers to establish historical time in order to make our comparisons, and craft our narratives. It’s about time we started thinking more explicitly about this reliance, and what it means for the stories we keep telling and the stories we have not yet been able to tell.
There are lessons for us to learn about how to write new histories in the present by taking a careful look at how, in the past, new histories were composed from new chronologies. In the cultures around Europe and the Mediterranean Sea in the ancient and medieval periods, scholars seem to have understood quite clearly that any new story about mankind required a new historical time, a new chronology. Writing a new time was thus an essential characteristic of a meaningfully distinct political community, and as a result was accorded great authority. This talk will present a few thought-provoking examples from works composed in Greek and Latin in order to illustrate these points, and to open up comparisons with other historical cultures and with modern historiographies.
Speaker
Prof. Jesse TORGERSON
College of Letters, Wesleyan University
ZOOM Meeting ID: 990 8868 4183
Meeting link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183
