ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter gives closing remarks on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book argues that the cartographic spaces of different interpretative communities impacted upon the narration of the 1600–1601 Ottoman-Habsburg sieges of Nagykanizsa in a way that divergent, plural pasts were constructed or remembered. There are a number of scholars who having embraced the subjective, contested, plural nature of history as they understand it, have written narratives, which through their form and blurring of genre boundaries, foreground the ultimately arbitrary and contingent nature of traditional empiricist history as articulated by reconstructionist historians. In addition to reconceptualising the traditional form and focus of histories, some historians have viewed this as an opportunity to rethink the possible functions that histories might have. The analysis, in the book, foregrounds how easily perspective shifts – how different implied audiences, genre conventions and sociopolitical cartographies impact on a narrative and affect the nexus of meanings available to interpretative communities.
