Course aims:

Introducing the students in research methods of the past by using various types of historical writing.
Understanding the phenomenon of gradual enlargement of the history that led to the diversification issues and types of historical sources.
-

Course Entry Requirements:

-

Course contents:

Introduction. The meanings of "History" and "Historiography". Ancient and modern. Contemporary debates. Prologue to the history of historiography. Keeping records and making accounts in Egypt and Babylon. Ancient Greece (I). From myth to history. The great century: Herodotus and Thucydides. Ancient Greece (II). The Hellenistic and Greco-Roman historiography. Ancient Rome (I). Early Roman historiography. The history in Roman Republic: Sallust and Caesar. Ancient Rome (II). The history in the imperial Rome: Livy and Tacitus. The late Antiquity: Flavius Josephus and Ammianus Marcellinus. The Christian Historiography. Bible and history. The making of Church history. The medieval historiography. Carolingians and Anglo-Saxons. Annals, chronicles and histories. From Renaissance to Baroque. The Italian humanist history: Machiavelli and Guicciardini. The discovery of Feudalism. The erudite history. The history in the eighteenth century. The French and British Enlightenment. The German Aufklärung. From Revolution to Restoration. The idea of liberty and the making of modern nation. The German historicism. The quest for a science of history. Auguste Comte. Karl Marx and the economic history. The institutionalisation of history. The historiography between Two World Wars. The French historians and a new vision of the past. Historiography and ideology. The historiography in the contemporary world. The Marxist theory. Historical tendencies in western democracies. The history and the Postmodernity.

Teaching methods:

Lecture, conversation, exemplification.

Learning outcomes:

Retrieval of edited information about the historical past; Establishing historical facts based on the information from the sources and outside sources; Oral and written presentation in English of the specific discipline knowledge; The concrete production of new historical knowledge on the basis of deeper insights within the study of an epoch and/or of a medium complexity historical subject.

Learning outcomes verification and assessment criteria:

Oral examination.

Recommended reading:

Breisach, Ernst, Historiography. Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Third Edition, Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Burrow, John, A History of Histories. Epics, Chronicles, Romances & Inquiries from Herodotus & Thucydides to the Twentieth Century, Penguin Books, 2009.
Chatelet, François, La naissance de l’histoire. La formation de la pensée historienne en Grèce, Paris, Les Éditions du Minuit, 1962.
Clark, Elizabeth A., History, Theory, Text. Historians and the Linguistic Turn, Harvard University Press, 2004.
Gaddis, John Lewis, The Landscape of History. How Historians Map the Past, Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press, 2002.