Religion, Nature, and the Emergence of Academic Historiography (1830-1870)

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During the nineteenth century, history emerged as an independent discipline within European academia. This development has been investigated from several perspectives. Firstly, approaches affiliated with intellectual history have focused on the writings of the discipline's most prominent representatives and have assessed how their works were influenced by the 'philosophy of history' and by the movement of Romanticism. Secondly, scholars have investigated how the emergence of academic historiography was connected to processes of nation and state building in Europe. Whereas traditional approaches have analysed how historians contributed to constructing national identities through their writings, recent studies have also taken into account how academic institutions such as universities or archives featured in national or imperial projects. Thirdly, several studies have engaged with the discipline's thematic and methodological conflicts such as the German Methodenstreit. Thus, it has been shown that the development of key concepts and methods of academic historiography was influenced by the disciplines of philology and linguistics.Building upon these insights, my project applies a different perspective. I argue that the emergence of academic historiography and its paradigms can only be understood against the backdrop of controversies about the historicity of nature and religion which gained currency in Europe between around 1830 and 1870. These debates were part of a process which has been referred to in research as 'temporalisation'. Regarding religion, scholars such as David Friedrich Strauss questioned the very existence of Jesus as a historical person as well as the authenticity of religious relics from the 1830s onwards. Furthermore, it was exactly during this era that key elements of the genuinely historical narrative of 'secularisation' were established. Similar patterns can be observed in the natural sciences. After Charles Lyell had published his hypotheses on 'evolution' in 1832, the natural sciences saw intense discussions both on the reasons for historical change and on the question of how to investigate the past properly. They peaked following the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. The proposed project takes its cue from the coincidence of these controversies with the emergence of history as an independent discipline within European academia. By focusing on the years between 1830 and 1870 which preceded the aforementioned methodological conflicts at the end of the century, we might get new insights into how the disciplinary framework of history emerged. For this purpose, I aim at comparing British, French, and German historians.Historicising both methods and concepts of historiography requires a twofold approach. Regarding the conceptual level, I shall analyse journals such as the Göttinger Gelehrte Anzeigen or the Revue des Deux Mondes. During the first half of the nineteenth century, these periodicals were transnationally read and featured both articles and book reviews by scholars of all disciplines. The findings of this study will be backed by the examination of journals specifically dedicated to the study of history such as the Historische Zeitschrift which was founded during the period at hand. The assessment of debates within these journals will reveal networks of historians who not only engaged with conceptual but also with methodological problems during the period at hand. Therefore, analysing their unpublished writings such as reading excerpts, project outlines, drafts, or diaries will highlight how conceptual discussions directly influenced the methods of investigating and writing history. This promises to elucidate historical research practices, i.e. how source material was both chosen and analysed and, finally, how the results were presented in coherent stories about the past.