This series offers engaging introductions to major fields within the study of history, exploring how each discipline has been shaped and developed. It outlines the core themes, methods, and ongoing debates that define these areas of inquiry. Readers gain the tools to better understand historical texts and critically engage with historiographical approaches. It's an ideal starting point for anyone seeking to grasp the foundations of historical research.
What is Medieval History? provides an accessible, far-ranging and passionate guide to the study of medieval history. The book discusses the creation of the academic field, the nature of the sources, the intellectual tools used by medievalists, and key areas of thematic importance from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Reformation.
James Raven, a leading historian of the book, offers a fresh and accessible guide to the global study of the production, dissemination and reception of written and printed texts across all societies and in all ages. Students, teachers, researchers and general readers will benefit from the book's investigation of the subject's origins, scope and future direction. Based on original research and a wide range of sources, What is the History of the Book? shows how book history crosses disciplinary boundaries and intersects with literary, historical, media, library, conservation and communications studies. Raven uses examples from around the world to explore different traditions in bibliography, palaeography and manuscript studies. He analyses book history's growing global ambition and demonstrates how the study of reading practices opens up new horizons in social history and the history of knowledge. He shows how book history is contributing to debates about intellectual and popular culture, colonialism and the communication of ideas. The first global, accessible introduction to the field of book history from ancient to modern times, What is the History of the Book? is essential reading for all those interested in one of society's most important cultural artefacts.
What Is the History of Emotions? offers an accessible path through the thicket of approaches, debates, and past and current trends in the history of emotions.
What is Cultural History? has established itself as an essential guide to what cultural historians do and how they do it. Now fully updated in its third edition, leading historian Peter Burke offers afresh his accessible guide to the past, present and future of cultural history across the globe--
What is the history of knowledge? This engaging and accessible introduction explains what is distinctive about the new field of the history of knowledge (or, as some scholars say, knowledges in the plural ) and how it differs from the history of science, intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge or from cultural history.