Introduction

The study of history has a history itself. Before the 19th century, when history became a professionalized academic discipline, a wide range of genres and modes of representation carried the name of history. This diversity of genres and forms was accompanied by a corresponding variety of agents. If history was not a specialised type of research, composing, writing and publishing history was not restricted to persons trained in specific academic methods. According to Jean Bodin (1530–1596) and other early modern theorists, the best historian was the experienced statesman, with close connections to the political and military events that he described. But women, clergy, merchants and, in some cases, peasants also wrote histories of their family, life, profession or village. Though marginalised by later professionalisation of history, this diversity of texts and even images from the 16th to the 18th century is a rich and fruitful source not only to early modern life, but also to early modern understandings of history, memory and the past and to its categories and genres of knowledge.