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Historians of religion face complex interpretive issues when examining religious texts, practices, and experiences. This book presents the work of twelve eminent scholars whose research has exemplified compelling strategies for negotiating the difficulties inherent in this increasingly important area of historical inquiry. The chapters range chronologically from Late Antiquity to modern America and thematically from the spirituality of near eastern monks to women's agency in religion, considering familiar religious communities alongside those on the margins and bringing a range of spiritual and religious practices into historical focus. Focusing on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the book addresses matters central to the study of religion in history, in particular texts and traditions of authority, interreligious discourse, and religious practice and experience. Some chapters examine mainstream communities and traditions, others explore individuals who crossed religious or confessional boundaries, and still others study the peripheries of what is considered orthodox religious tradition. Encompassing a wide geographical as well as chronological scope, the book illustrates the persistence of central themes and common analytical challenges for historians working in all periods.

This book provides a systematic account of the problems of reference, truth, and meaning in historical writing. It works from the conviction that the historicist account of historical writing, associated primarily with Leopold von Ranke and Wilhelm von Humboldt, is essentially correct but that its original idealist and romanticist idiom needs to be translated into more modern terms. Rehabilitating historicism for the contemporary philosophy of history, the book argues, “reveals the basic truths about the nature of the past itself, how we relate to it, and how we make sense of the past in historical writing.” At the heart of the book is a sharp distinction between interpretation and representation. The historical text is first and foremost a representation of some part of the past, not an interpretation. The book's central chapters address the concept of historical representation from the perspectives of reference, truth, and meaning. The book then goes on to discuss the possible role of experience in the history writing, which leads directly to a consideration of subjectivity and ethics in the historian's practice. The book concludes with a chapter on political history, which is the “basis and condition of all other variants of historical writing.” The book's rehabilitation of historicism is a powerfully original and provocative contribution to the debate about the nature of historical writing.

The philosophy of “presence” seeks to challenge current understandings of meaning and understanding. One can trace its origins back to Vico, Dilthey, and Heidegger, though its more immediate exponents include Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and such contemporary philosophers of history as Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia. The theoretical paradigm of presence conveys how the past is literally with us in the present in significant and material ways: Things we cannot touch nonetheless touch us. This makes presence a post-linguistic or post-discursive theory that challenges current understandings of “meaning” and “interpretation.” This book provides an overview of the concept and surveys both its weaknesses and its possible uses. It explores the possibilities and limitations of presence from a variety of perspectives. The book features critical engagements with the presence paradigm within intellectual history, literary criticism, and the philosophy of history. In three original case studies, presence illuminates the relationships among photography, the past, memory, and the Other. What these diverse but overlapping chapters have in common is a shared commitment to investigate the attempt to reconnect meaning with something “real” and to push the paradigm of presence beyond its current uses.

To what extent do we and can we understand others – other peoples, species, times, and places? What is the role of others within ourselves, epitomized in the notion of unconscious forces? Can we come to terms with our internalized others in ways that foster mutual understanding and counteract the tendency to scapegoat, project, victimize, and indulge in prejudicial and narcissistic impulses? How do various fields or disciplines address or avoid such questions? And, in the light of recent developments, have these questions become particularly pressing and not in the least confined to other peoples, times, and places? Making selective and critical use of the thought of such important figures as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Mikhail Bakhtin, the book investigates a series of crucial topics from the current state of deconstruction, trauma studies, and the humanities to newer fields such as animal studies and posthumanist scholarship. A feature of the book is the effort to bring critical historical thought into a provocative engagement with politics and our current political climate.