The Past as Text

Postmodernism has challenged historians to look at historical texts in a new way, and to be skeptical of the claim that one can confidently retrieve "fact" from historical writings. In "The Past as Text" historian Gabrielle M. Spiegel sets out to read long-familiar mediaeval histories and chronicles in light of the critical-theoretical problems raised by postmodernism. At the same time she urges a method of analysis that enables the reader to recognize these texts simultaneously as artifice and as works deeply embedded in a historically determinate, knowable social world. Arguing for the "social logic of the text", Spiegel provides historians with a way to retrieve the social significance and conceptual claims produced by these mediaeval writings. Spiegel begins by providing the theoretical basis for the study of mediaeval historiography. She then demonstrates this theory in practice, offering readings of mediaeval histories and chronicles as literary, social and political constructions.
Spiegel concludes that the historian should be equally aware of the discursive nature, literary modes and ideological investments of such texts as the social circumstances to which they were applied and by which they were generated.