Beyond the Timeline: Resetting Historiography

Responding to 20th/21st c. attempts like Walter Benjamin’s prophetic historian, this volume asks: How to write history without following the chronologically oriented trajectory of time? The interdisciplinary contributions from a broad range of history (medieval, modern, music, sciences), sociology, life sciences, genocide research go back to a symposium that responded to a publication of Markus Vinzent (Writing the History of Early Christianity. From Reception to Retrospection of 2019, Cambridge University Press). The scholars engage with the idea of retrospection as a method of critical historiography.

Writing retrospectively is not simply a matter of presentism, reversing chronology, it disrupts continuities and teleologies and opens creative futures.