How historians begin: openings in historical discourse

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Author’s final version. Definitive version available at www.blackwell-synergy.com.

Published in History, 95:4 (2010), pp. 399-417

How historians begin: openings in historical discourse

Trevor Dean

Roehampton University

Abstract

Why is the problem of beginning – much discussed in literary scholarship – not dealt with in

similar depth by historians? This article attempts an answer to this question, and does so in

three ways. First it examines literary scholarship on textual openings, showing the various

ways in which the beginning is given significance. Then it examines and challenges the

common presentation of historical discourse as distinct from fiction. Finally it examines two

sets of data: the openings of one hundred historical monographs are analysed for their

‘fictionality’, and the openings of two hundred research articles are analysed for their

rhetorical structures.

Text

The difficulty of beginning has a long history. The second-century orator and historian

Aelius Aristides, faced with the problem of commencing an oration in praise of Athens,

urged the sophistic argument that there are always many beginnings to any topic: ‘The

argument reveals many beginnings almost everywhere, which cannot be used

simultaneously’.1 This means to avoid prioritising (while in fact prioritising) was later pirated

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by Leonardo Bruni in his celebrated early-fifteenth-century work in praise of the city of

Florence.2 Yet historians are always faced with the issue of having to tear into the ‘seamless

web’ of the past, as Maitland called it, aware that their textual beginnings and those of the

events they tell cannot coincide.3 ‘History, as Jacob Burckhardt remarked, is the one field of

study in which one cannot begin at the beginning.’4 The problematics of beginnings are

much studied by literary scholars, who insist on the memorability of opening lines, and on

the significance of the part to the whole of fictional texts; but historians hardly consider the

issue at all, while historiographers do not regard memorability or the part-to-whole relation

as important. This essay emerges from the tension between these two observations. In

general it aims to contribute to the debate started by Hayden White in his formalist analysis

of histories ‘purely as formal verbal structures’:5 how far do historical and fictional

discourses ‘overlap, resemble or correspond with each other’? But it does this by

considering fragments of historical texts, not the form and mode of whole works of history.

The paper is divided into two halves: in the first, I investigate the fictional qualities of

historians’ beginnings, and in the second their rhetorical structures.

I

In works of historiography, even of the most practical kind, there is very little reflection on

how to begin writing. In the chapter on writing in Geoffrey Elton’s The Practice of History:

nothing.6 In a book promisingly entitled Writing History: Theory and Practice, published in

2003: nothing.7 Not even Alan Munslow’s recent Narrative and History, which aims ‘to

explain how historians make and, specifically, write history’, has anything to say on

beginning.8 This general disregard for the craft of opening is well expressed in some of the

contributions to a volume published in 1970 and entitled The Historian’s Workshop, in which

a group of historians were invited to reflect, in autobiographical mode, on the progress of

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one of their books from first idea to publication and reception. J.G.A. Pocock described his

preparation for writing (books, notes, paper, pen, ink), then said: ‘I must cast about once or

twice for a suitable rhetorical exordium, and then the patterns begin to develop as the

sentences and paragraphs take shape’.9 And L.P. Curtis: ‘No sooner had I found the “right”

beginning and abandoned most of my original outline, than the words began to tumble out in

profusion as though a small dam had given way’.10 Both of them essentially say that the

opening is a mere piece of lubrication, insignificant in itself. This is very much a stereotype

of literary production - the opening as the magical formula, to unlock or unblock, sweeping

aside previous plans. For the actuality of this formula, we can look to Günther Grass’s

account of the genesis of his novel The Tin Drum: he spent weeks at his desk ‘looking for the

words to make a sentence that would open doors’, ‘a sentence terse enough to blow up the

dam and let the words flow’.11 Historians and novelists might thus agree: some texts allow

themselves to be written only when the author finds the key.

Compare historiography with literary production and literary scholarship. Creative writing

courses give explicit advice and exercises on how to write openings: they categorise

openings, and teach ways to ‘give the audience reasons’ for reading on, or to ‘make the

reader ask questions’.12 In literary analysis, the primary French narratologist, Gérard

Genette writes in his Narrative Discourse of ‘the unavoidable difficulty of beginning’, the

difficulty residing in the tension to be resolved between the starting point and temporal

sequencing of the textual narrative and the starting point and sequencing of the story being

told.13 Genette outlined two kinds of literary opening – in medias res and the retrograde

movement of narrative embeddings – and Antony Nuttall fashioned his book Openings out of

applying that scheme to openings from canonical works of European literature.14 French

scholars have studied the openings of Flaubert, Balzac, Zola and Dumas, raising issues such

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as the use and manipulation of commonplaces and stereotypes, the creation of the hors texte

(points of reference in the reader’s world) and the representation of textual space.15

‘Books naturally divide into two parts: Part One: the beginning of the book; and Part Two:

the rest of the book’.16 For literary scholars the opening thus functions as frontier,

distinguishing an inside and an outside, a threshold for the text, and a threshold for the

reader (between the space in which the reader lives and the space encountered in the

novel: ‘first sentences should be long in order to tear the reader out of his everyday life’

[Borges]).17 Edward Said summed up this attitude in his own work, Beginnings: ‘Every writer

knows that the choice of a beginning ... is crucial, not only because it determines much of

what follows, but because a work’s beginning is ... the main entrance to what it offers’.18

Literary openings are determinant because they have memorability: ‘the first word of a text

remains longest with the reader’.19 They are determinant because they establish time, place,

and narrative voice. They are determinant because they set up a ‘counterpoint’ with the

rest of the work, sketching outlines by which readers comprehend the whole: openings

becoming ‘expressive of the whole work’.20 Openings set the rules of the game to be played

by the reader, guiding responses. The study of literary beginnings thus relates to three

strands in literary scholarship: the ways that texts are constructed (temporality, sequencing,

emplacement, narrative voice), the ways that they relate to the non-textual world (the hors

texte, the threshold), and the ways that readers respond to them (inducing continued

reading, inducing a type of reading, announcing themes memorably).

In historical scholarship, in contrast, openings are not generally recognised as a problem.

Three exceptions are noteworthy. Michael Stanford’s Companion to the Study of History

explicitly addresses the issue of openings, in the course of a discussion of the differences

between fictional and historical narrative: ‘the opening words of a novel’, he argues, ‘not

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only start the action, they show the reader where to stand in order to view it’; but the

historian, he continues, has only one place to stand (his own) and only one attitude (that of

impartial observer) and does not presume to dictate the reader’s response.21 This is a

contentious, perhaps naive, argument, and discounts the extent to which in history as in

fiction the narrator’s position is not individual but seeks to ‘enter into minds that are unlike

our own’.22 However, Stanford’s position echoes a range of scholarly opinion regarding the

focalising options available to the historian.23 The second exception is J.H Hexter, who at

one time moved in the direction ‘micro-analysis’ or the examination of ‘any fragment of

historical rhetoric without primary regard to and out of relation to the historiographic

whole of which it is a part’,24 and later raised the question ‘Where should I begin the story?’

Hexter did not consider this to be a problem: though the choice would seem to lie, he

wrote, between ‘infinite regress’ along the ‘continuous causal chain’, and ‘random choice of

starting point’, in fact starting points are easily found.25 More recently, a study of quotations

in historians’ opening paragraphs, has examined in detail at the practice by which ‘a plurality

of voices is woven into a complex dialogic pattern.’26 Insofar as historiographical scholarship

has addressed the problem of opening it has either made general statements without

systematic analysis, or brushed the issue aside, or examined only one aspect of historians’

practice.

There is one further problem to be addressed at the outset: is the category of opening line

an obvious one in works of history? Journal articles present no difficulty, except for the

growing practice of inserting an abstract between the title and the first sentence. In books,

however, before the first line of Chapter One, come the title page, the contents page, the

acknowledgements, and the preface (collectively, the paratext). From the reader’s point of

view, the first line of Chapter One is often not the point of entry into reading the book:

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before that s/he will have perused the blurb on the book-jacket, looked up some items in

the index, opened the book at random and read the odd sentence or paragraph. So at the

point of reception first lines are not actually first lines. To complicate matters further, there

is sometimes authorial dialogue between paratext and first line.27 These three issues – the

paratext, the reader’s reading sequence, dialogue between paratext and first line - might

seem to vitiate any focus on the opening line of Chapter One. Nevertheless, that opening

line does remain marked off as separate and significant: page numbering changes from roman

to arabic, thus placing the preface, prologue, or foreword ‘outside the content’ of the

book.28 Also, from the first line of Chapter One, the register changes: in the paratext, the

historian is speaking personally, as an author; from chapter one, s/he is speaking as a

historian. According to Roland Barthes, this draws attention to a different time frame, the

complex, non-linear time of the discourse itself.29 Some late twentieth-century historical

practice has sought to elide the difference between these registers or voices, constructing a

more ‘subjective’ authorial voice,30 but it has to be said that this mode has not had great

impact on the body of historical writing.

How far does the argument of Hexter, Genette and Nuttall – that the only analytical choice

is between in medias res and infinite regression – apply to the writing of history? On the one

hand, it could be argued that everything in history is in medias res, in that every event is part

of a process, and, on the other hand, that, as Burckhardt argued, it is impossible to start at

the beginning, either because there is no single beginning or because the beginning is out of

sight. In order to examine recent and contemporary historical practice, I have used both an

inductive and a deductive method in order to draw distinctions from and similarities to

fiction: first, by examining a corpus of examples; second, by using categories established in

discourse analysis.

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To establish a corpus, I took the opening words of one hundred recent monographs,

selected at random. These display just six basic tropes at the level of content:

1. An initial event, marking an important transition: a birth, a death, a coronation, an

election, a marriage, a moment of arrival, an act of artistic commissioning, a new policy, the

overthrow of a government, the opening or closing of an era, and (cleverly) a historian

beginning to write.31

2. An achievement, changing the condition of the object of study: the building of an empire,

the conquest of a country.32

3. A perception or a state of affairs, either in the past (and therefore implicitly contrasted to

the actuality) or in the present.33

4. A rationale: stating the scale of the object of study and/or the scope and purpose of the

study itself. The former usually takes the form of a superlative assertion of size, asserting an

individual or event to be ‘the strangest and most troubling’, ‘the most powerful and

influential’, ‘the most brilliant’, or ‘the most decisive’,34 but is sometimes defensively

parodied by stressing an apparent lack of size or significance: ‘poor relations’ or ‘unlikely and

... unprofitable objects of investigation’.35 Otherwise, purpose and scope are simply stated:

‘This is a study of institutional extremism’, for example.36

5. Reference to other texts, either by quotation, or by allusion in asserting continuity or

discontinuity within historiographical trends or debates.37

6. Puzzles, mysteries and strange denials: ‘How French people tried to make sense of their

childhood and adolescence in past centuries remains something of a mystery’.38 ‘This book

takes up a subject that has no history’.39

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A preliminary conclusion would be that none of these is impossible in fiction: nascent

events, perceptions, quotations, mysteries are all common there.

A second perspective is to use the concept of ‘positioning’ – the frame of reference used to

introduce a topic whether in narrative or exposition – and the categories for this

established in a work of discourse analysis on textual openings and closings.40 These

categories are: the synoptic (making a general statement about events or people), the

episodic (recounting ‘a particular event ... specifically located in time and space’), the

contextual (making reference to a non-textual starting point), the discursive (making explicit

reference to the activity of narration or exposition), the situational (‘beginning abruptly with

a concrete scene’: in medias res in its common meaning) and the prescriptive.

Using a broader range of examples, the first preliminary point to note is that historians

certainly can plunge straight into the action (the ‘situational’):

In S. Zeno Cathedral of Pistoia the Washing of the Disciples’ Feet was just ending.41

Berliners, gaunt from short rations and stress, had little to celebrate at Christmas in

1944.42

Some historians start with their own experiences or visions (contextual):

In the early 1950s, when I was living in Paris, I happened to see a short film – a court

métrage – I cannot recall the name of its maker, but the film itself has remained very

vividly in my mind.43

J’ai longtemps rêvé d’écrire l’histoire d’une petite ville, Romans par exemple en

Dauphiné; cité que je hante avec plaisir; province dont j’aime les habitants et les

paysages.44

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Others make general statements, sometimes epigrammatic in tone, about events or people

(synoptic):

Inside every historian there lies concealed a biographer struggling to get out.45

European pastoralists are always other people.46

Some prefer the episodic:

In September 1934, some 22 months after coming to power in Germany, Hitler gave

an important address to the NS-Frauenschaft, the main political organization for Nazi

women in Nuremburg.47

On an evening at the beginning of March in the year 1484, the podestà of Piacenza

witnessed a strange and alarming scene in the streets of the city.48

Finally, the more reflexive might begin by making explicit reference to the activity of

narration or exposition (the discursive),

Nella storia come nella narrativa, il primo problema è sempre quello di scegliere il

punto di partenza: cominiciare dal principio.49

Florence might be thought, of all cities, not to need an introduction, for its legend

always precedes it: the ‘birthplace of the Renaissance’ and the ‘cradle’ of western

civilization.50

Historians can thus reveal their own memories and desires, comment on other historians,

assert the special nature of their objects of inquiry, tell us (in external focalisation) what

historical actors saw or experienced, and justify the content and method of their texts.

Personal experience, maxims, specific events, reflexivity as narrator: all of these could easily

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be paralleled from fiction. Two key differences between fictional and historical narration

would seem to remain: the absence of the narrator as a character in the story, and the

absence of internal focalisation (seeing from within another character’s point-of-view).

Though it has been suggested that the historical author may herself be considered a

character,51 the pressure within the profession and its outlets in academic journals and

publishing houses would seem to confine the historian to an omniscient viewing-point.

Synoptic, contextual and discursive openings adhere to that rule. Insofar as they explore

intention and attitude, historians can approach a character’s frame of perception, and they

do attempt to ‘mind-read’, changing their viewing point and speaking voice through the

insertion of quotations. However, this change of viewing point is inhibited by historians’

need for certainty, and fear of uncertainty: no historian would begin, ‘All this happened,

more or less’.52 With their specificities of date, place and names, with their mixture of

evaluative, differentiating and totalising vocabulary (‘always’, ‘every’, ‘Berliners’), openings

adhere to this second rule.

The differences from fiction are underlined by two elements of content: referentiality and

historiography. Quotations and footnotes, precise dates and places refer us to events that

really happened. The declarations of importance and the references to other scholars by

name or inference place the new work in the context of the historiography. Some

historians stress one of these elements at the expense of the others. Accentuated

referentiality produces the ‘archival opening’:

The box D4 UI 7, in the fonds of the justices de paix of Paris, kept in the Archives de

la Seine, entitled Basse-Geôle de la Seine, procés-verbaux de mort violente (ans III-IX),

lists the particulars of 404 persons (there are in fact 405 procés-verbaux, but one man

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is listed twice) who met violent deaths through suicide, accidents, murder and

natural causes.53

This has a very factual appearance – the shelfmark, the precise numbers – and it conjures up

a picture of the archive, the physicality of historical evidence, the historian gathering data. In

starting a work of history, the archival opening represents the start of the historian’s work –

or, at least, the implied start.

Recent examples of the historiographical opening, such as

Vengeance has been a hot topic of debate among classical scholars for several years

now.54

The explosion of interest in the history of women and gender, triggered in the

1960s, has produced theories about how women’s status and opportunities have

been determined in recent centuries.55

show how they situate the text in a contextual academic story – a debate, an explosion,

products – and provide justifications for writing, and for reading.

Referentiality and historiography pull historical openings away from fiction, but two other

elements draw them back again: readability and temporal construction. Suspenseful devices,

such as arresting quotations, engagingly excessive claims, the hint of danger or threat, give

the text a readable quality. When accentuated, as has become common, readability offers

us characters or places, devoid of reference to documents, historiography or even dates.

The final years of the fourteenth century were hard ones for Margarida Gramone.56

His name was Domenico Scandella, but he was called Menocchio.57

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On the last night of her life, Vittoria Savelli wore an old shift.58

A stage, in a fifteenth-century Italian square.59

Montaillou is not a large parish.60

These opening escape entirely the categories of positioning. They call attention to their thin

referentiality. They are almost fictional in their absence of reference to context or

discourse: they resist ‘lamination’ (to use a metaphor of Michel de Certeau’s) by the archive,

by quotations, references and notes.61 These openings focus rather on place and character,

in much the same way as the first lines of many novels. Sometimes they have just three

essential elements: they name the main actor, they place her in time, and they describe her

experience – in much the same way as the novels of, for example, Graham Greene often

commence with a name, a place and a perception. Four of these examples omit a date:

‘Sans sa date, un événement n’est pas même historique’.62 Others recall numerous novels

that open with an act of naming (‘“Call me Ishmael.”’; ‘Everyone called him Pop Eye.’; ‘The

boy’s name was Santiago.’).63 The third example here – a woman in her shift – suspensefully

reduces the frame to a character and her clothing, while constructing time by reference to

her life-span, not to external dating. This reduction of space is found also in the last two

examples, the first of which avoids any possibility of action by omitting a main verb. As

Ankersmit has pointed out (using Barthesian terms), such microhistorical works are all

‘notation’ (trivial detail) and no ‘predictive’ (meaning/story), and effectively ‘contemporise’

the past.64 Such reduction in scale owes much to microhistory’s rhetoric of smallness as

counterpoint to the common rhetoric of magnitude found in proems.65 Against the topos of

stressing the magnitude of the object of research, microhistory has spread the practice of

belittling the object.

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The other element of fictionality in historical openings lies in their construction of time. In

his essay on historical discourse, Barthes briefly touches on beginnings, which he

characterises as ‘destructive’, because they are places where the start of the matière énoncé

joins the start of the énonciation.66 Barthes was drawing these conclusions mainly from

‘classics’ of historical literature (Herodotus, Joinville, Michelet, Machiavelli), but they apply

equally to contemporary historical practice. In particular, the junction, at the beginning of a

text, of two different times, that of the material and that of its presentation, is markedly

present in a good number of openings, which often have double, sometimes triple, temporal

points of reference.67

In 1797 Immanuel Kant, a frail 73-year-old bachelor soon to enter the physical and

mental helplessness of his final years, published The Metaphysics of Morals, the last of

the great building blocks of a massive philosophical edifice.68

In a book replete with useful instructions for those about to sail to India, written by

Thomas Williamson, who had served in the Bengal army for twenty-five years,

appears a plate depicting the Marquis Wellesley and his suite at the breakfast table of

the nawab of Awadh.69

In the first example, the ‘time of things’ (to use de Certeau’s formulation) is 1797 (the year

of publication), but the ‘discursive time’ takes us into Kant’s final year and to his reputation,

living and posthumous. The second case is rather more complex. The matière énoncé is

actually the plate in the volume, the picture (which the reader sees on turning the page)

showing figures at breakfast against a background of elephants in combat. This advice book

itself is presented as looking forward in time (‘for those about to sail to India‘) while the

historian also looks backwards into the career of the author (twenty five years in the Bengal

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army). In this case, temporally prospective and retrospective views are embedded within a

construction in present time. The historian-narrator’s knowledge is thus, like the

omniscient fiction-writer’s, ‘panchronic, encompassing in retrospect the narrative agent’s

entire life stories’.70

History resembles fiction in three respects: in medias res is an initial possibility; readability

and temporal construction place the historian in the same positions as the novelist in

relation to readers and to narrated material. On the other hand, historical texts with their

limited range of focalisation, and their non-character narrator, deny themselves the full

range of narratological possibilities: the more common starting points lie in historiography,

in situated episodes, and in general statements about historical agents or the writing of

history.

II

If historical beginnings share some features with fiction, they also have rhetorical functions.

A branch of applied linguistics has been animated for some years by John Swales’ claim that

‘the typical introduction is a crafted rhetorical artifact’ and by his analysis of that craft.71

Swales divides the introduction of research articles into a number of rhetorical ‘moves’ –

four in his 1981 formulation, three in his 1990 revision of the model – each in turn

subdivided into a variable number of optional ‘steps’. Naming the model as CARS (Create a

Research Space), Swales present it as first ‘establishing the territory’ (showing the

‘centrality’ of the topic, outlining current knowledge, reviewing previous research), then

‘establishing a niche’ (typically by indicating a gap or questioning the validity of existing

interpretations) and finally ‘occupying the niche’ (by describing the new project).

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Since 1990, numerous scholars have investigated the applicability of this model in different

academic disciplines, mainly in the sciences and social sciences, arguing for further

modification to take account of differences both between and within disciplines, between

empirical and theoretical articles, and between articles in English and those in other

languages.72 Among the variations observed are the absence of one or more moves, the

cyclical (rather than linear) sequencing of moves, and the need for additional elements

within moves, such as research questions, or theoretical positions.73 Scholars have also had

to find solutions to the problem of distinguishing between moves, of establishing their

borders, given that one move can be embedded in another or that two moves can inhabit

the same sentence.74 Specialised articles of historical research have not featured much in

these investigations (one scholar included two historical articles in a small sample), 75 so I

have constructed a large sample of 200 article introductions, by taking all the articles from

eleven history journals published in the year 2005.

Certainly, centrality claims are used by historians, and in an initial position, as in the Swales

model.

Politeness has recently become a central concept in the intellectual history of

eighteenth-century Britain.76

Perhaps no area of historical inquiry has been as contentious as that concerning early

Stuart religion and its link to political life.77

Sometimes, a centrality claim is cleverly combined with the indication of a gap:

To an outsider, what is noteworthy about the long-standing debate over the decline

of the Liberals in Britain is the scant consideration it has given to parallel cases.78

16

All told, 37 of the sample of 200 articles used such formulations, claiming that this or that

phenomenon is crucial for historians, dominant in the historiography or ‘at the heart of the

debate’. 79 However, a strange thing happens to centrality in the hands of historians: it is

transferred from the historiographical context (‘this is central because historians continue

to debate it’) to the historical period under consideration (‘this was perceived or

experienced as central by contemporaries’). Centrality is projected from the historian’s

activity to that of the historical actors. Thus, ‘Palmerston saw it [the religious question] as

one of his central tasks’,80 the films of Marcel Pagnol were ‘some of the most popular in the

history of the French cinema ... and hotly contested pieces of ideological capital’,81 pass-

books ‘defined the essence of life in Apartheid South Africa’,82 and ‘nationalism was a key

force in shaping the political and social landscape of Europe’.83

Equally common among historical openings, however, is what Swales calls a topic

generalisation, that is, a statement about the current state of knowledge in the relevant area.

Thirty-eight articles in the sample used this as an initial move.

Scholars of later medieval languages and their literatures have often argued for a

‘dawn’, ‘rise’ and subsequent ‘triumph’ of the vernacular in western Europe.84

It is ‘common knowledge’ that the majority of accused ‘witches’ during the ‘witch-

craze’ of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were female.85

And finally, the other (later) moves and steps in the Swales model also feature occasionally

as opening statements in historical articles. A few authors go straight for the gap:

‘Historians of English witchcraft have not been particularly interested in male witches’;86

Rather more state their purpose in writing: ‘this article attempts to catalogue, analyse and

assess ...’,87 and so on.

17

The CARS model helps construct a typology of the openings of historical research articles.

However, adjustments have to be made: centrality claims are not the most common

opening move, and they are distorted by historians’ focus on temporality. Moreover, the

model accounts for under half of the opening sentences in the sample (92 out of 200).

Rather more important numerically (98 instances) are three other forms of opening, absent

from the CARS model. These are the use of quotations (25 instances), narrative fragments

or episodes (30) and exposition (43). Quotations can serve many functions: distancing

author from content, displaying erudition, enhancing credibility, and so on.88 Use of a

quotation can suggest ‘a writer who is trying to hide traces of her own presence’, and can

‘typify an event’, ‘intensify a representation’, or ‘express a position’.89 None of these

functions is contained within the CARS model.

As regards narrative fragments and expositions, some definition is needed. I define

exposition as the description of a situation, institution, territory, a publication or long term

development, which takes on the subject position in the sentence and erases individual

agency: what Paul Ricoeur has termed ‘realist’ historiography.90 The sample thus contains

undifferentiated human groups (‘Irish women’, ‘composers in central Germany’, ‘English men

and women’), institutions (monarchical power, the German army), territories (France, ‘the

German lands’, Latin America), publications (Zola’s novels, books, a report), and abstract

nouns (‘the debate about abortion law’, the economy, the coming of the railroad). Long-

term developments include experiences, such as the transformation of middle class life;

continuous behaviour, such as political engagement; and evolutions, such as modernisation

or economic growth. In terms of narratological criteria for selecting events, expositions

constitute a group of processes or transitions.91 Narrative fragments, on the other hand,

are constructed at the level of individuals and small groups, what Ricoeur terms ‘nominalist’

18

historiography.92 In narratological terms, they encapsulate choices and confrontations.93

Thus, individuals ‘stood ... on trial’,94 ‘appeared ... to give testimony’,95 or ‘made the greatest

criminal arrest of his career’.96 Other individuals ‘received a letter’,97 or ‘made a surprising

admission’.98 Narrowly defined groups of people are said to have ‘descended upon Berlin’,99

‘devastated the district’,100 ‘constructed a new ... shooting range’,101 and ‘arrived at the

tomb’.102 This group of episodes is more clearly constructed as narratives, but narrative is

not absent from the expositions, and is implied by the long-term changes that are referred

to. The difference is one of levels not alternatives,103 and of nominalisation (individuals as

against ‘generic classes of participants’).104

In order to analyse this group of openings – the narrative and the expository – notions from

de Certeau are helpful. Writing of the role of quotation in historical texts, de Certeau

argued that quotation was ‘an instance of the general rule that requires for the production

of realistic illusion the multiplication of proper names, descriptions and deictics’. This

multiplication he also saw as performative, one of the aspects of display in historical

writing.105 Yet in openings, the display imperative is often in tension with the narrative voice

of the author, as will become apparent. The following examples illustrate the combination

of names, deictics and narrative:

“You will be shot in five minutes...” ran the headline in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 24

June 1954 in an article on the trial of former Wehrmacht Generalleutnant Theodor

Tolsdorff in the town of Traunstein in southern Bavaria.106

On Wednesday 4 April 1604, an unnamed bailiff in the tiny village of Zandt, 25 miles

south west of Nuremberg, made the greatest criminal arrest of his career.107

19

On 10 March 1952 A.J. Turton, the Senior Urban Areas Commissioner of the

Department of Native Affairs (NAD), received a very urgent telegram from Werner

Epstein, the Departmental Secretary, instructing him to take the next train to Cape

Town.108

In this kind of dense ‘referential grounding’,109 authors make one of three solutions to the

problem of balancing narrative, names and deictics. In the first case, the threat of fatal

action is followed by numerous deictics (date, place of headline, name and location of town)

and the name and status of the convict. The second example reverses the order, in a

periodic sentence in which the deictics precede the action. The third example is more

complex, with the action (urgent telegram: take next train) cut up and placed after

specification of date, names and status. These openings also tend to be broken stylistically

into two, as authors perhaps try to offset the conventional forms for names, dates and titles

with a livelier style to express action. Some historians bridle the deictic impulse,

withholding rather than supplying information:

In January 1699 a spasm of anxiety jolted the judges of the Parlement of Besançon.110

In 1356 Elisende d’Alquer, abbess of the monastery of Sant Daniel, made a surprising

admission.111

This sort of opening, now quite common in both articles and books, would seem to have

benefited from more careful reflection on the use of narrative in historical discourse. It

‘floats’ some temporal or spatial coordinates;112 it draws the reader on, often by the use of a

single word (‘anxiety’, ‘surprising’) that requires explanation; it focuses on the trivial or

unexpected.113 This sort of opening was not practised fifty or so years ago: article incipits

from English Historical Review and Past and Present for 1955 fit much more neatly and fully

20

into the Swales model, claiming centrality, indicating a gap, reviewing previous research,

making a topic generalisation. 114 Absent in 1955 are superlatives and diminutives regarding

magnitude, and specificity as to time: dates are indicated by years or centuries, but never by

any smaller unit of time. The rhetoric of openings did not then encompass the small-scale

or the individual event, and did not reach for comparative measures of significance. If

historical openings can be divided generally between the ‘phenomenic’ and the ‘epistemic’,

that is focusing either on the specific (event, individual, idea) or on a ‘significant intellectual

debate’,115 then the second half of the twentieth century saw the rise of the phenomenon

and the decline of the episteme. Another victory for microhistory.

The CARS model has some applicability for historical works: establishing a territory and a

niche, and occupying that niche are certainly major elements in the historian’s repertoire of

incipits. But ultimately the model breaks down: historians often want to start in different

ways, from different places: from a quotation that discusses a relevant theme, from an

example of individual experience, from a statement about group behaviour or structural

evolution. We have to invent new categories, related to the tropes and positions examined

above, in order to take account of this. Works of history start differently from those of

other disciplines because on the one hand of history’s attachment to narrative,

discursiveness and voices from the past, and because of its resistance, on the other hand, to

the social-science model for reporting research findings.

III

Model-breakdown is the fate of analyses from both fiction and applied linguistics when

applied to historical openings. Though in content and positioning, in readability and

temporal construction, history and fiction share common narrative modes, history marks its

21

difference by referentiality and historiography. Though in centrality and topic generalisation

history aligns with the common rhetoric of the social sciences, it diverges through its use of

narrative fragments (yet in those fragments themselves, the tension is repeated between

historical and fictional modes). The problem of beginning for the historian thus lies in

choosing from among the historiographical, the fictional and the scientific, or attempting to

blend any two of these elements. The results can be alluring or repellent. Some analyses of

fictionality can provide some concluding indications of why this might be the case. Various

theorists of fiction have posited that fictionality is a ‘contextual assumption’ made by the

reader on the basis of information provided by the author;116 that fictionality determines the

types of inferencing that the reader may make, licensing the ‘imaginary extension of the

scope of knowledge’ (for example, through internal focalisation);117 and that the characters

of fiction fall into one of three types: natives (only found in one work of fiction), immigrants

(from other texts or from the real world), and surrogates (versions of real-world

persons).118 Because fictional worlds are ‘incomplete’, readers are guided to read in a

particular way, to make inferences about characters and situations, to recognise them as

fictional or real (or surrogate). Historicity too can be seen as a contextual assumption

made by the reader on the basis of information provided by the author (the paratext,

deictics): but here inferencing is minimised, as focalisation is restricted and the type of

characters reduced to just one, immigrants, as all persons in works of history are migrants

from other texts, whether factual or fictional. Historians use the written and visual

evidence of both real and imaginary people to create new texts with claims to factuality. In

establishing the pretended non-fictionality of the historical text, the first sentence plays a

key role in determining the reader’s assumptions and expectations. Three moves

predominate as means to this end. First, reference is often made to other works of history,

either through quotation or general reference to historiographical vision, debate or re-

22

appraisal. Second, a factual purpose is declared, either through a statement or a question.

Third, the opening sentence is often dense with references to actors or objects to be found

in other ‘factual’ texts or in the real world (dates, places, people, titles, roles). By these

means, historians succeed in concealing the elements of their writing that they share with

the writers of fiction: they conceal them from themselves and they conceal them from their

readers. Hence the absence of reflection on this issue.

23

1 P. Aelius Aristides, The Complete Works, trans. C. Behr, 2 vols (Leiden, 1981-6), i, 6.

2 ‘... many orators say that they themselves do not know where to begin ... it is not an easy

thing to say which subject is to be treated first’: ‘Panegyric to the City of Florence’, in The

Earthly Republic, ed. B. G. Kohl and R. G. Witt (Philadelphia, 1978), p. 136.

3 ‘Such is the unity of all history that any one who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel

that his first sentence tears a seamless web’: F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of

English Law (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1898), p. 1.

4 M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (1956), p. 25.

5 H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore,

1973), pp. 3-4.

6 G. R. Elton, The Practice of History, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2002).

7 Writing History: Theory and Practice, ed. S. Berger, H. Feldner and K. Passmore (2003).

8 A. Munslow, Narrative and History (Basingstoke, 2007); p. 1 for the quotation.

9 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Working on Ideas in Time’, in The Historian’s Workshop: Original Essays by

Sixteen Historians, ed. L. P. Curtis (New York, 1970), p. 162. I thank Professor John Tosh for

this reference.

10 L. P. Curtis, ‘Of Images and Imagination in History’, ibid., p. 267.

11 G. Grass, Peeling the Onion (2007), pp. 419-22. For this and other metaphors: Z. Leader,

Writer’s Block (Baltimore, 1991), pp. 8-10; C. Romagnolo, ‘Narrative Beginnings in Amy Tan’s

The Joy Luck Club: A Feminist Study’, Studies in the Novel, xxxv (2003), 89.

12 J. Singleton, The Creative Writing Workbook (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 240; J. Hyem, ‘Opening

Scenes’, in Taking Reality by Surprise: Writing for Pleasure and Publication, ed. S. Sellers (1991),

pp. 72-3.

24

13 G. Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, 1980), p. 46.

14 Ibid., pp. 35-46, 54, 62-7; A. D. Nuttall, Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the

Novel (Oxford, 1992).

15 C. Duchet, ‘Pour une socio-critique ou variations sur un incipit’, Littérature, i (1971); idem,

‘L’idéologie de la mise en texte’, La pensée, ccxv (1980); G. Lascault, ‘Commencements de

Dumas’, L’Arc, lxxi (1977); J. Verrier, Les débuts de romans (Paris, 1988).

16 M. Goulish, 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance (2001) [hereafter 39 Microlectures],

p. 59. I thank Professor Joe Kelleher for this reference. The observation is Aristotelian: P.

Arrington and S. K. Rose, ‘Prologues to What is Possible: Introductions and Metadiscourse’,

College Composition and Communication, xxxviii (1987), 306.

17 Lascault, ‘Commencements de Dumas’, p. 6; Borges quoted in M. Goulish, 39

Microlectures, p. 62.

18 E. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 2nd edn (1985), p. 3.

19 V. Brombert, ‘Opening Signals in Narrative’, New Literary History, xi (1980), 495; similarly

S. G. Kellman, ‘Grand Openings and Plain: The Poetics of First Lines’, Sub-Stance, xvii (1977)

[hereafter ‘Grand Openings and Plain’], 140.

20 Kellman, ‘Grand openings and plain’, p. 144. Key examples are Shakespearean: M. J. B.

Allen, ‘Toys, Prologues and the Great Amiss: Shakespeare’s Tragic Openings’, in

Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. D. Palmer and M. Bradbury (1984).

21 M. Stanford, A Companion to the Study of History (Oxford, 1994), pp. 87-92.

22 Herbert Butterfield, quoted in E. Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English

Novel (Princeton, 1983), p. 67.

25

23 Munslow, Narrative and History, pp. 48-9; D. Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore,

1999), pp. 119-20; K. Pihlainen, ‘The Moral of the Historical Story: Textual Differences in

Fact and Fiction’, New Literary History, xxxiii (2002), 53-4.

24 J. H. Hexter, ‘The Rhetoric of History’, in his Doing History (1968), pp. 46-7.

25 J. H. Hexter, The History Primer (1972), pp. 218-19.

26 M. Silver and M. Bondi, ‘Weaving Voices: A Study of Article Openings in Historical

Discourse’, Linguistic Insights, xv (2004) [hereafter, ‘Weaving Voices’], 156.

27 ‘Aficionados of Paul Scott and of television drama will instantly recognise the allusion in

my title’: A. E. Curry, ‘Lancastrian Normandy: The Jewel in the Crown’, in England and

Normandy in the Middle Ages, ed. D. Bates and A. Curry (1994), p. 235.

28 V. K. Bhatia, ‘Genre Mixing in Academic Introductions’, English for Specific Purposes, xvi:3

(1997), 185.

29 R. Barthes, ‘Le discours de l’histoire’, in Le bruissment de la langue (Paris, 1984) [hereafter

‘Le discours de l’histoire’], pp. 156-7.

30 P. Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier

(Baltimore, 1992), pp. 84-91.

31 D. Loades, Elizabeth I (2003), p. 1; J. M. Walker, The Elizabethan Icon: 1603-2003

(Basingstoke, 2003), p. 1; G. J. White, Restoration and Reform 1153-1165: Recovery from Civil

War in England (Cambridge, 2000), p. 1; D. Romano, The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Francesco

Foscari 1373-1457 (New Haven, 2007), p. 1; R. M. Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves:

Royal Protocol in early modern England (Cambridge, 2000), p. 1; L. L. Knoppers, Constructing

Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait and Print, 1645-1661 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 1; C. P. Murphy, The

Pope’s Daughter (2004), p. 3; L. Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in

Seventeenth-century England (Cambridge, 2005), p. 1; R. G. Musto, Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di

26

Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age (Berkeley, 2003), p. 1; C. Shaw, Popular Government and

Oligarchy in Renaissance Italy (Leiden, 2006), p. 3; J. Osgood, Caesar’s Legacy: Civil War and the

Emergence of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2006), p. 1.

32 M. Aurell, The Plantagenet Empire 1154-1224 (2007), p. 1; R. Bartlett, England under the

Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075-1225 (Oxford, 2000), p. 1.

33 K. Sharpe, Remapping early modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-century Politics

(Cambridge, 2000), p. 3; S. Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others (New Haven,

2005), p. 1; M. E. Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), p.

1.

34 D. Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 2000), p. 1; L.

L. Huneycutt, Matilda of Scotland: A Study in Medieval Queenship (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 1; J.

Guy, Thomas More (2000), p. 1; I. Worthington, Philip II of Macedonia (Hew Haven, 2008), p.

1.

35 S. Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2002), p. 1; P. Denley,

Commune and Studio in late medieval and Renaissance Siena (Bologna, 2006), p. 1.

36 I. V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany

(Ithaca, 2005), p. 1; among many examples.

37 J. Gooch, Mussolini and his Generals: The Armed Forces and Fascist Foreign Policy, 1922-1940

(Cambridge, 2007), p. 1; R. MacKenny, Renaissances: The Cultures of Italy, c.1300-c.1600

(Basingstoke, 2005), p. 1; S. Sidlavskas, Body, Place and Self in Nineteenth-century Painting

(Cambridge, 2000), p. 1; etc.

38 C. Heywood, Growing up in France: From the Ancien Regime to the Third Republic

(Cambridge, 2007), p. 1.

27

39 B. C. Hett, Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser’s Berlin

(Cambridge, Mass., 2004), p. 1.

40 L. Tolchinsky, V. Johannson and A. Zamora, ‘Text Openings and Closings in Writing and

Speech: Autonomy and Differentiation’, Written Language and Literacy, v (2002).

41 D. Weinstein, The Captain’s Concubine: Love, Honour and Violence in Renaissance Tuscany

(Baltimore, 2000), p. 3.

42 A. Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002), p. 1.

43 R. Cobb, Reactions to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1972), p. 1.

44 E. Le Roy Ladurie, Le carnaval de Romans (1979), p. 9.

45 A. J. P. Taylor, From Napoleon to the Second International: Essays on Nineteenth-Century

Europe, ed. C. Wrigley (1993), p. 24 (first published in Wiener Beiträge zur Geschichte der

Neuzeit, 1979).

46 C. Wickham, ‘Pastoralism and Underdevelopment in the early Middle Ages’, Settimane di

Studio (Spoleto), xxxi (1983), 401.

47 M. Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich (2003), p. 1.

48 D. M. Bueno de Mesquita, ‘Ludovico Sforza and his Vassals’, in Italian Renaissance Studies,

ed. E. F. Jacob (1960), p. 184.

49 P. J. Jones, ‘La storia economica. Dalla caduta dell’impero romano al secolo XIV’, in

Einaudi, Storia d’Italia, vol. 2, pt 1 (Turin, 1974), p. 1469. Cf. ‘Where and how to begin, that

is the problem for a speaker or writer’: R. Syme, ‘Human Rights and Social Status at Rome’,

Classical Outlook, lxii (1986-7), 37.

50 J. M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200-1575 (Oxford, 2006), p. 1.

28

51

C. W. Bynum, ‘In Praise of Fragments: History in the Comic Mode’, in eadem,

Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion

(New York, 1991), p. 25.

52 K. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York, 1991; first published 1969), p. 1.

53 R. Cobb, Death in Paris (Oxford, 1978), p. 3. Other examples: C. De la Roncière, Un

changeur florentin du Trecento: Lippo di Fede del Sega (1285 env. – 1363 env.) (Paris, 1973), p.

11; C. Ginzburg, ‘Witchcraft and Popular Piety: Notes on a Modenese Trial of 1519’, in C.

Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues (1990), p. 1.

54 F. McHardy, Vengeance in Classical Greece (2008), p. 1.

55 J. Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (2001), p. 1.

56 S. McDonough, ‘Impoverished Mothers and Poor Widows: Negotiating Images of Poverty

in Marseille’s Court’, Journal of Medieval History, xxxiv (2008), 64.

57 C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller

(Harmondsworth, 1992).

58 T. V. Cohen, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 2004), p. 17.

59 A. Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Renaissance (2001), p. 3.

60 E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in A French Village, 1294-1324 (1978),

p. 3. In the original version in French, this is the second sentence of Chapter One, which

follows a 13-page ‘Avant-propos’: Montaillou, village Occitan de 1294 à 1324 (Paris, 1975).

61 M. de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York, 1988), p. 94.

62 B. Lacroix, L’historien au Moyen Age (Montreal and Paris, 1971), p. 85.

63 The opening lines of: H. Melville, Moby Dick; L. Jones, Mister Pip; and P. Coelho, The

Alchemist, trans. A.R. Clarke.

29

64 F.R. Ankersmit, ‘The Reality Effect in the Writing of History: The Dynamics of

Historiographical Topology’, Medelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van

Wetenschappen, lii:1 (1989), 32.

65 Aristotle, On Rhetoric, trans. G. A. Kennedy (Oxford, 2007), p. 234 (1415b).

66 Barthes, ‘Le discours de l’histoire’, pp. 155-6.

67 P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (2 vols, Chicago, 1984), i. 146.

68 A.J. La Vopa, ‘Thinking about Marriage: Kant’s Liberalism and the Preacher Morality of

Conjugal Union’, Journal of Modern History, lxxvii (2005), 1.

69 S. Sivasundaram, ‘Trading Knowledge: The East India Company’s Elephants in India and

Britain’, Historical Journal, xlviii (2005), 27.

70 U. Margolin, ‘Reference, Coreference, Referring and the Dual Structure of the Literary

Narrative’, Poetics Today, xii (1991), 526. See also P. Hernadi, ‘Clio’s Cousins:

Historiography as Translation, Fiction and Criticism’, New Literary History, vii (1976), 250.

71 J. M. Swales, Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (Cambridge, 1990),

pp. 137-60; p. 157 for the quotation.

72 A. Arvay and G. Tanko, ‘A Contrastive Analysis of English and Hungarian Theoretical

Research Article Introductions’, International Review of Applied Linguistics, xlii (2004); I.

Ozturk, ‘The textual organisation of research article introductions in applied linguistics:

variability within a single discipline’, English for Specific Purposes, xxvi (2007).

73 D. Bunton, ‘Generic Moves in PhD Thesis Introductions’, in Academic Discourse, ed. J.

Flowerdew (2002).

74 B. Kanoksilapatham, ‘Rhetorical Structure of Biochemistry Research Articles’, English for

Specific Purposes, xxiv (2005), 270; V.K. Bhatia, Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional

Settings (1993), pp. 85-9.

30

75 S. Hunston, ‘Professional Conflict: Disagreement in Academic Discourse’, in Text and

Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, ed. M. Baker, G. Francis and E. Tognini-Bonelli

(Philadelphia & Amsterdam, 1993). R. Holmes used ten articles from the American Historical

Review in his ‘Genre Analysis and the Social Sciences: An Investigation of the Structure of

Research Article Discussion Sections in Three Disciplines’, English for Specific Purposes, xvi

(1997), 321-37.

76 M. Peltonen, ‘Politeness and Whiggism, 1688-1732’, HJ, xlviii (2005), 391.

77 C. A. Prior, ‘Ecclesiology and Political Thought in England, 1580-c. 1630’, HJ, xlviii (2005),

855.

78 M. Fairburn and S. Haslett, ‘Voter Behaviour and the Decline of the Liberals in Britain and

New Zealand, 1911-29: Some Comparisons’, Social History, xxx (2005), 195.

79 M. Föllmer, ‘The Problem of National Solidarity in “Interwar Germany”’, German History,

xxiii (2005), 202; W. M. Ormrod, ‘The Royal Nursery: A Household for the Younger

Children of Edward III’, English Historical Review, cxx (2005), 398; P. Nightingale, ‘Some New

Evidence of Crises and Trends of Mortality in late medieval England’, Past & Present, clxxxvii

(2005), 33; J. Mark, ‘Society, Resistance and Revolution: The Budapest Middle Class and the

Hungarian Communist State, 1948-56’, EHR, cxx (2005), 963.

80 J. Wolffe, ‘Lord Palmerston and Religion: A Reappraisal’, EHR, cxx (2005), 907.

81 P. Bowles, ‘Politicizing Pagnol: Rural France, Film and Ideology under the Popular Front’,

French Hist., xix (2005), 112.

82 K. Breckenridge, ‘Verwoerd’s Bureau of Proof: Total Information in the Making of

Apartheid’, History Workshop Journal, lix (2005) [hereafter ‘Verwoerd’s Bureau of Proof’], 83.

83 V. Tolz, ‘Orientalism, Nationalism and Ethnic Diversity in late Imperial Russia’, HJ, xlviii

(2005), 127.

31

84 M. Vale, ‘Language, Politics and Society: The Uses of the Vernacular in the later Middle

Ages’, EHR, cxx (2005), 15.

85 K. Jones and M. Zell, ‘”The divels speciall instruments”: Women and Witchcraft before

the “Great Witch-hunt”’, Soc. Hist., xxx (2005), 45.

86 E. J. Kent, ‘Masculinity and Male Witches in Old and New England, 1593-1680’, HWJ, lx

(2005), 69.

87 C.J . Bearman, ‘An Examination of Suffragette Violence’, EHR, cxx (2005), 365; D. A.

Gordon, ‘The Backdoor of the Nation State: Expulsions of Foreigners and Continuity in

Twentieth-century France’, P & P, clxxxvi (2005), 201.

88 W. Teubert, ‘Evaluation and its Discontents’, in Strategies in Academic Discourse, ed. E.

Tognini-Bonelli and G. Del Lungo Camiciotti (Amsterdam, 2005), pp. 197-8.

89 Silver and Bondi, ‘Weaving Voices’, pp. 147, 152.

90 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, ii. 153.

91 M. Bal, Narratology, 2nd edn (Toronto, 1999), pp. 182-3.

92 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, ii. 153.

93 Bal, Narratology, pp. 184-6.

94 C. Patterson, ‘Quo Warranto and Borough Corporations in early Stuart England: Royal

Prerogative and Local Privileges in the Central Courts’, EHR, cxx (2005), 879.

95 L. Wertheimer, ‘Illegitimate Birth and the English Clergy, 1198-1348’, JMed.H, xxxi

(2005), 211.

96 J. F. Harrington, ‘Tortured Truths: The Self-Expositions of a Juvenile Career Criminal in

early modern Nuremberg’, Ger. Hist., xxiii (2005) [hereafter ‘Tortured truths’], 143.

97 J. Conlin, ‘Wilkes, the Chevalier d’Eon and “the dregs of liberty”: An Anglo-French

Perspective on Ministerial Despotism, 1762-1771’, cxx, 120 (2005), 1251.

32

98 M. Herder, ‘Substitute or Subordinate? The Role of a Male Procurator at a Benedictine

Women’s Monastery’, JMed.H, xxxi (2005) [hereafter ‘Substitute or Subordinate?’], 231.

99 J. V. Evans, ‘The Moral State: Men, Mining and Masculinity in the early GDR’, Ger. Hist.,

xxiii (2005), 355.

100 M. Ó Siochrú, ‘The Duke of Lorraine and the International Struggle for Ireland, 1649-

1653’, HJ, xlviii (2005), 905.

101 D. Imhoof, ‘Sharpshooting in Göttingen: A Case Study of Cultural Integration in Weimar

and Nazi Germany’, Ger. Hist., xxiii (2005), 460.

102 M. Thomas, ‘Economic Conditions and the Limits to Mobilization in the French Empire,

1936-1939’, HJ, xlviii (2005), 471.

103 P. Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris, 2000), p. 307.

104 S. Eggins, P. Wignell and J. R.Martin, ‘The Discourse of History: Distancing the

Irrecoverable Past’, in Register Analysis: Theory and Practice, ed. M. Ghadessy (1993), esp. pp.

80-1.

105 M. De Certeau, The Writing of History (New York, 1988), pp. 94-5, 99-100.

106 A. Searle, ‘The Tolsdorff Trials in Traunstein: Public and Judicial Attitudes to the

Wehrmacht in the Federal Republic, 1954-60’, Ger. Hist., xxiii (2005), 50.

107 Harrington, ‘Tortured Truths’, p. 143.

108 Breckenridge, ‘Verwoerd’s Bureau of Proof’, p. 83.

109 B. Harshaw, ‘Fictionality and Fields of Reference’, Poetics Today, v (1984), 244-5.

110 D. Lee, ‘Judicial Politics, War Finance and Absolutism: The Parlement of Besançon and

the Venality of Office, 1699-1705’, Fr. Hist., xix (2005), 440.

111 Herder, ‘Substitute or Subordinate?’, p. 231.

112 Harshaw, ‘Fictionality and Fields of Reference’, p. 244.

33

113 Cf. Gossman on Carbin: ‘deliberately raw ... recounting of a strange incident’: L.

Gossman, ‘Anecdote and History’, History and Theory, xlii (2003), 165-6.

114 One exception turns out to be the third instalment of a longer article: A. P. Thornton,

‘British Policy in Persia, 1858-1890’, EHR, lxx (1955), 55.

115 Silver and Bondi, ‘Weaving Voices’, pp. 145, 147.

116 R. Walsh, The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction (Columbus,

2007), p. 30.

117 Ibid., p. 34.

118 T. G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Harvard, 1986), p. 29, referring to T. Parsons, Nonexistent

Objects (New Haven, 1980).