ABSTRACT
History, once documenting the wars and the rise and fall of states, has been writing its own history recently as its content and meaning increasing become the grounds for ideological battles. The simple record of the res gestae has been fractured. Scholars with varying perspectives strike new facets into monolithic conceptions of history, each facet reflecting a different view, each providing an alternative, often competing, perspective on the amorphous, burgeoning mass of information available about the past that each historiographer seeks to focus into coherence. Although such historical revisionism might compensate for the oversights of past historiography, when a scholar might leave unexamined his own assumptions and his own stake in a particular construction of history, in many ways the history of historiography has become our own “mirror of confusion.” Certainly, early modern studies have been enriched by this questioning of our historical premises and by the inclusion of alternative voices and viewpoints as scholars attempt to excavate the history of women and of other cultures from the rubble of the past’s dominant structures. And yet as history is reclaimed from the grasp of one monolithic or “hegemonic” view, it often appears that the process can only end when each scholar cuts his own particular view into this monolith, based on whatever group or groups with which he identifies, consciously creating his own historical mirror in which to see himself and his experience, writing history for those who agree to share his perspective.
