History as Wonder: Beginning with Historiography

235 Pages·2019·2.449 MB·English

by  Marnie Hughes-Warrington

HISTORY AS WONDER
History as Wonder is a refreshing new take on the idea of history that tracks the
entanglementofhistoryandphilosophyovertimethroughthekeyideaofwonder.
From ancient Greek histories and wonder works, to Islamic curiosities and
Chinese strange histories, through to European historical cabinets of curiosity and
on to histories that grapple with the horrors of the Holocaust, Marnie Hughes-
Warringtonunpacksthewaysinwhichhistoriansthroughouttheageshavetriedto
make sense of the world, and to change it. This book considers histories and his-
torians across time and space, including the ancient Greek historian Polybius, the
medieval texts by historians such as Bede in England and Ibn Khaldun in Islamic
Historiography, and more recent works by Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray and
RanajitGuha among others. Itexplores thedifferent waysinwhichhistorians have
called upon wonder to cross boundaries between the past and the present, the
universal and the particular, the old and the new, and the ordinary and the extra-
ordinary. Promising to both delight and unsettle, it shows how wonder works as
the beginning of historiography.
Accessible, engaging and wide-ranging, History as Wonder provides an original
addition to the field of historiography that is ideal for those both new to and
familiar with the study of history.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington is a professor of history at the Australian National
University. She is the author of several historiography books, including Fifty Key
Thinkers on History (three editions), History Goes to the Movies (2007) and Revisionist
Histories (2013).

HISTORY AS WONDER
Beginning with Historiography
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Firstpublished2019
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Title:Historyaswonder:beginningwithhistoriography/MarnieHughes-
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Group,2019.|Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.|Identifiers:
LCCN2018030489(print)|LCCN2018031025(ebook)|
Subjects:LCSH:Historiography.
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ISBN:978-1-138-84621-0(hbk)
ISBN:978-1-138-84622-7(pbk)
ISBN:978-0-429-42716-9(ebk)
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byTaylor&FrancisBooks
Thank you to the person who threw out the multi-volume Child’s Book
of Wonder from St Brendan’s Primary School Library, Flemington, in
the early 1970s. It was a remarkable gift.

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction xi
1 Sense and non-sense in Ancient Greek histories: Plato |
Herodotus | Thucydides | Phlegon | Polybius | Aristotle 1
2 Wonderful and curious histories in pre-modern Europe: Gerald
of Wales | Bede | Gervase of Tilbury | Augustine of Hippo |
Thomas Aquinas | Roger Bacon 21
3 Thewondersofhistoryinthepre-modernIslamicworld:AlTusi
|AlQazwini|AlTabari|IbnKhaldun|IbnSina|IbnRushd 42
4 Wonder against ritual: strange Chinese histories: Sima Qian |
Confucius | Duan Chengshi | Pu Songling | Yuan Mei |
Ji Yun 62
5 Historical cabinets of curiosity in early modern Europe: Jean
Bodin | Francis Bacon | Walter Ralegh | Nathaniel Wanley |
René Descartes | Thomas Hobbes 81
6 Spirited histories in modern Europe: Immanuel Kant | George
William Frederick Hegel | Daniel Defoe | William Howitt |
Sarah Josepha Hale | Leopold von Ranke 100
7 Seeing the wonder trick in histories of the moving image:
Lynne Kirby | Tom Gunning | Walter Benjamin | Roland
Barthes | Jonathan Crary | Mary Anne Doane | 120
viii Contents
8 History’s others, history’s ethics: Joan Wallach Scott | Lynn
Hunt | Merry Wiesner-Hanks | Luce Irigaray | Jacques
Derrida | Hélène Cixous | Marguerite La Caze 139
9 Renewing wonder in postcolonial histories: Ranajit Guha |
Gayatri Spivak | Romila Thapar | Rabindranath Tagore |
Kalidas̄a|̄ Abhinavagupta 158
10 The banality of history: Martin Heidegger | Hannah Arendt 178
Conclusion: I wonder as I wander: everyday historiography,
everyday metaphysics? 189
Bibliography 192
Index 206
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Books are carried to publication with thanks to the caring and thoughtful hands of
many colleagues, friends and family members.
I would like to acknowledge the opportunity to write this book in my role at
the Australian National University. In particular, I would like to thank Roxanne
Missingham and the staff of the ANU libraries for making it possible for me to
explore so many ideas from around the world, and for standing with such resolve
in favour of open access. Their resilience at the destruction by flood of copies of
many of the texts that I used to shape this book has been an inspiration to me.
I would also like to acknowledge the support of colleagues and students from
the ANU Research School of History and beyond both because of their wise
advice in seminars, and because of all the annotated draft chapters that are a his-
toriographer’s delight. Karen Downing and Tania Colwell gave me a great head
start on the literature review. Frank Bongiorno was an insightful reader and gen-
erated much thought with his own writings. Rae Frances and Bruce Scates were
generous with their support for the ideas in the book and eagle-eyed in spotting
opportunities for improvement. Jennifer Frost at the University of Auckland pro-
vided wise thoughts on chapters seven and eight. Merry Wiesner-Hanks at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison was both gracious and enormously helpful with
suggestions for chapter eight. Troy Larkins read the manuscript in speedy and
thorough fashion and helped with the identification of opportunities to be clearer.
Thanks go also to Paul Kiem at the History Teacher’s Association of Australia for
responding to my ideas all the way along, and for so tirelessly promoting the value
of studying the past.
Mark Donnelly and Claire Norton at the Centre for the Philosophy of History
at St Mary’s Twickenham were patient with early ideas about this book, and I am
immensely grateful to both of them and to the audience of my first talk about it.
Towardstheendofwriting,Ifeltfortunatetobeabletosharesomeoftheideasin