Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon

István M. Szijártó

Theory and Practice

What Is Microhistory?

Wim Blockmans

László Kontler

This volume investigates the history of the representative assemblies of Sweden (the riksdag), Poland (the sejm) and Hungary (the diaeta) in the final period of the ancien régime. It concentrates on the practices and ideas of parliamentarism and constitutionalism, and examines the ideologies that motivated the members of these parliaments. Attempts at the suppression as well as the restoration of the estates’ power in all these three countries are examined, as well as, in the case of Hungary, the establishment of popular representation that eventually replaced the estates. These three early modern representative assemblies have never before been explored systematically in a comparative framework.

Volume I: Representative Institutions and Political Motivation

Parliamentarism in Northern and East-Central Europe in the Long Eighteenth Century

This unique and detailed analysis provides the first accessible and comprehensive introduction to the origins, development, methodology of microhistory – one of the most significant innovations in historical scholarship to have emerged in the last few decades. The introduction guides the reader through the best-known example of microstoria, The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, and explains the benefits of studying an event, place or person in microscopic detail. In Part I, István M. Szijártó examines the historiography of microhistory in the Italian, French, Germanic and the Anglo-Saxon traditions, shedding light on the roots of microhistory and asking where it is headed. In Part II, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon uses a carefully selected case study to show the important difference between the disciplines of macro- and microhistory and to offer practical instructions for those historians wishing to undertake micro-level analysis. These parts are tied together by a Postscript in which the status of microhistory within contemporary historiography is examined and its possibilities for the future evaluated. What is Microhistory? surveys the significant characteristics shared by large groups of microhistorians, and how these have now established an acknowledged place within any general discussion of the theory and methodology of history as an academic discipline.

István M. Szijártó

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