ABSTRACT
Postmodernism and history have made uneasy partners. Indeed, as we have already seen, historians have been particularly prone to severe bouts of pomophobia, behaving in the manner suggested by Tissot in the quotation above – affronted that the supposedly perfect object of their passion might be subject to external critique. So when they haven’t gone so far as to attack postmodernism, they’ve usually contrived to ignore it, in the belief, presumably, that it’s an irritant that will simply disappear if they keep their heads down and uncontaminated by any such irrelevant theorising. Professor Norman Davies has described postmodernism as ‘a pastime . . . for all those who give precedence to the study of historians over the study of the past’ – implying, among other things, that even if postmodernism (discounted, significantly, as nothing more serious than a ‘pastime’) might have something to do with historians, it has nothing whatever to do with history, or with what historians do.2
