Ute Daniel is going to present a working paper on 'Marx and Weber on Doing History'

The historiography of democracy mostly tends to focus on movements and endeavours the aims of which were to foster democratic developments and political participation. These topics are extremely important. But they do not help to understand why democratic constitutions were established or universal franchise was introduced (or why both was rejected). So my project asks why monarchs and
governments, parliaments and parties in the course of the 19th and early 20th century extended the franchise (or why they refused to extend it). The underlying hypothesis is, that universal suffrage – the core of democracy as we understand it today – was brought about neither by pro-democratic movements nor by governing classes convinced of the inevitability of democratic developments before 1914, but by the First World War.

Markus Vinzent is going to present a working paper on 'How to write History. From Reception to Retrospection'

Life must be understood backwards, but … it must be lived forwards’ (S. Kierkegaard); and so it is with writing history. It is done in retrospection, recollection and reflexion, by looking backwards; and it is written anachronologically, although the outcomes are chronological narrations. Having jumped into the past to reflect upon it, historians skip the time gap, and start walking alongside our protagonists. It is a strange phenomenon, an enigma, that our brain recognition always works backwards and in this sense seems to be conservative; while language with its in-built grammar always moves forwards, hence seems to be progressive and work creatively. Even when people ‘are forward-looking’, when they base their actions on a ‘cognitive map’ that is linked to future outcomes, in contrast to people who are consciously ‘backward-looking’ and ‘experience based’; even those who are forward-orientated and make ‘plans for the future’ are, at least ‘in part historically’ conditioned, a conditioning derived ‘from the actor's mental model of the world’ they know, or think they know. The imaginary future is but an extrapolation of our imagined past and, conversely, the future is a projection from ‘an anticipation of where the course of world events is going overall’ (Ch. Guignon). Without doubt, ‘historiography is feasible as an undertaking only if the historian, in looking at the plethora of what has happened in the past, is able to select the events that are to count as historically relevant for a historical account’, which means, historians must always actively evaluate what they are looking at.

The workshop paper elaborates on this outline which will be published as an introduction of the forthcoming book 'M. Vinzent, Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection' (Cambridge University Press).

Cornel Zwierlein presents a working paper on 'Oriens contra Asiam: a spatio-temporal distinction emerging around 1700 (a study on Eusèbe Renaudot)'

Around 1700, several major political and religious controversies were troubling the courts of Europe as well as the Republic of Letters. A new vision of the Orient was emerging with the help of empiricist study of the religion of the Eastern Churches. This was linked to the West’s own disputes between Huguenots, royal Catholics and the less royal and less Catholic Jansenists in France, between episcopalists, Presbyterians, jurors and non-jurors in England before and after the Glorious Revolution. At the same time, starting in the mid-1680s, for the first time, the Far East became a major political affair across Europe during the so-called debate about the Chinese ceremonies and the choices to be taken regarding the Jesuit Mission to China. Also at the same time, on the level of historico-philosophical debates, the Querelle des Anciens et des modernes took off, and in historical chronology and geological sciences, debates about the synchronization of the different civilizations of the world as well as disputes about the shape and age of the earth took place. This all seems to belong to very different histories, but many intellectuals, like Eusèbe Renaudot, were actors in all those fields. He can thus serve like a prismatic reflector to make understand the links between those epistemic fields and intersections. We can understand, how the mental maps of the early enlightenment were reconfigured, how even something like a ´Middle East´ emerged as an actor eventually opposed to ´(Chinese) Asia´, how the discovery of the medieval Nestorian mission of China could serve ideological purposes around 1700 and how the Querelle des Anciens et des modernes was transformed into a comparison between civilizations across time and global space.

Aditya Malik gives a working paper on 'Hammira: Inception of a History'

The paper has two parts each representing truncated, though I hope interconnected, versions of longer chapters and themes that I plan to explore in a book I am writing for De Gruyter. In the first part of the paper I discuss the historical and literary context(s) of the Hammira-Mahakvya and its main protagonist, Hammira, with a view to showing that contrary to Indian nationalist historiographies of the second half of the 20th century, the texts under consideration do not represent a conflict between Hindus and Muslims but rather rivalries and friendships between scattered ethnicities and clans competing for political control in northern India between the 11th-16th centuries. Moreover, I aim to show that the social category of the Rajput (‘prince’, ‘warrior’ etc.) that crystallizes in the 15th-16th centuries transcends both ethnic and religious compartmentalization by signifying attributes, qualities and ethical values that once internalized by an individual could be expressed through heroic action regardless of caste or religious affiliation (i.e., by both Hindus and Muslims). The second part is more conceptual in nature springing from the fact that the Hammira-Mahakavya originates in a dream presented to the author of the text by the dead hero whose life and deeds lie at the center of the ‘great poem’ (Sanskrit: mahakavya). The question that arises here is whether history with its fundamental concern with empirical evidence, facts and what is considered ‘real’ can originate in the subjective, inner world of dreams or what is considered ‘unreal/imaginary’. Is the ‘unreal’ or imaginative fabric
equally or more important here than the ‘real’, empirical structure? While history concerns itself with the past, it is also obvious that not all statements about the past are considered to be history. It is only when the past is presented to us – ‘constructed’ one could say – in a particular manner that it becomes ‘history.’ Not every statement or perspective of the past therefore qualifies as history. But how exactly does history get constructed, particularly in the Indian/South Asian context? What does it mean to think about the past? Where is this thinking about the past located? Moreover, what does thinking and, in particular, imagination mean in the Indic context? Can history begin in a dream?