(UN)DOING HISTORY

A CASE FOR EPISTEMOLOGICAL ALTERITY

VANITA SETH

History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024)

This article addresses two primary tensions that currently beset medieval history. The first concerns a contentious debate within the field regarding the relative merits of two interpretative approaches: that which seeks to situate the Middle Ages within a narrative of continuity wherein aspects of the medieval bear some relationship of familiarity with the present and that which accords a radical alterity to the past that instigates moments of historical rupture. The second tension concerns the fraught relationship between history as a site of knowledge production with some proximity to engaging and producing truth and history as constructed, wherein its purported object of study, the past, is not an ontological fact but a cultural artifact. In this instance, what we witness is less a debate among scholars within history than an amorphic anxiety about history. This article makes a case for engaging the radical alterity that confronts the historian of the Middle Ages. It does so, however, cognizant of an ontological impasse: if alterity is attentive to difference, a difference that resists translation into modern knowledge regimes, then what does it mean to engage it historically—that is, through a temporal structure that would have been foreign to the very period of study?

Photo by Jené Stephaniuk on Unsplash