Peter Burke

• 6 honorary Ph.Ds
• Professor Emeritus at Emmanuel College cambridge

This chapter attempts to assess the distinctive role of exiles and expatriates in the history of knowledge with the aid of two case studies. The first of these analyses the work of the French Protestant scholars who were expelled from France by King Louis XIV in 1685 and found a home in London, Amsterdam, Berlin and elsewhere. The second case study...

This article tries to place Hayden White's Metahistory between two trends: one before and one after 1973. The first is the trend towards studying the rhetoric of history: a trend that goes back to classical antiquity itself, was revived at the Renaissance and – following the moment of positivism – enjoyed a second revival in the age of the linguist...

Este artigo argumenta que a esperança tem uma história no sentido de que pessoas em diferentes épocas históricas têm esperança de coisas diferentes. Na verdade, ela tem uma história cultural, social e política, porque diferentes grupos sociais têm esperanças diferentes - de salvação, de liberdade, de segurança, de mobilidade social e assim por dian...

This article argues that the concept of the ‘Republic of Letters’ or ‘commonwealth of learning’ is just as useful for writing the intellectual history of the modern period, 1750–2000 as it is in the case of the early modern period, to which the term is generally confined. The rise of nationalism and specialization in the nineteenth century was suff...

IntroductionThe Ancient WorldThe Chinese and the ArabsThe Western Middle AgesConclusion References

Following on from Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing (2001), this article considers again the potential for collaboration between historians and art historians, and presents 'ten commandments' to be borne in mind by historians who wish to make use of visual materials in their work.

This texts offers a reflection on the origins and actual development of the field of cultural history through a comparison with the term that has served as title for this seminar: “polyphonic history”. The author provides an overview of the themes that have structured the seminar (the history of representations, the history of the body and the cult...

This story is a small part of a larger one, the Great Diaspora of central and east European intellectuals in the 1930s, to Britain, USA, France, Latin America etc. Exile may be regarded as a school, a form of adult education, not only for the exiles themselves but also for some of the natives who come to know them. Focussing still more sharply, let...

Dossier: Encuesta sobre historia intelectual

Attempting to combine cultural history with translation studies, this article examines translation between languages as a special case of a more general phenomenon, translation between cultures. It surveys printed translations made in Europe between 1500 and 1700, discussing which kinds of people translated which kinds of book from and into which l...

This article is concerned with three questions: Can historians make use of Freud's ideas? Have they done so in the past? Should they do so in the future? It begins with a personal encounter with Freud's ideas and then raises some general questions about the relation between psychoanalysis and history.

To speak of an 'early modern' world raises three awkward problems: the problem of early modernity, the problem of comparison and the problem of globalisation. In what follows, a discussion of these problems will be combined with a case study of the rise of humanism.

This article is concerned with the relation between language and collective identities. Since 1789, language has been associated more and more closely with national identity. Before the French Revolution, on the other hand, the identities expressed by language were more likely to be religious, regional, occupational or sexual. All the same, a conce...

This article looks at the history of European culture from three angles, those of European uniqueness, European variety and European consciousness. The first section discusses the question of whether the fundamental unit of study, for cultural as well as economic historians, is not Eurasia. The second section is concerned with cultural divisions wi...

This article argues that European vernaculars were in closer contact with one another and with languages spoken outside Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries than they had been in the Middle Ages, when Latin dominated written communication. Increased contact led to borrowing, mixing and hybridization, some of it highly self-conscious (as in the cas...

Peter Burke explores major themes in the social and cultural history of the languages spoken or written in Europe between the invention of printing and the French Revolution. One theme is the relation between languages and communities and the place of language as a way of identifying others, as well as a symbol of one's own identity. A second, link...

In diesem Buch geht es um das neue Wissen, das sich nach Erfindung des Buchdrucks verbreitete. Welches Wisse, welche Informationen wurden wie, von wem und in welchen Zusammenhängen verbreitet und genutzt? Wer hatte ein Interesse an der Verschleierung von Wissen, an der Unterdrückung von Informationen, und warum?\ Welche Formen des Wissens gab es (h...

Erasmus was the first European intellectual to become famous, in the majority of European countries in his own lifetime. He thus illustrates the increasing importance of the international scholarly community or (respublica litteraria), a phrase which he helped to launch and which was common currency until the age of Voltaire. This article examines...

This article is concerned with the different circunstances in wich comments are made as one event (usually in the past) when the commentators are really preoccupied with another (usually in the present). It distinguishes pragmatic allegory, to be found whenever there are restrictions on freedom of political speed, from mystical allegory, which assu...

Interview with Peter Burke about ignorance nowadays.

Traducción de: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence

From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, patterns of living and communication in the Netherlands transformed dramatically due to developments such as the rise of cities and the invention of the printing press. Now, cultural historian Peter Burke demonstrates the key role these changes played in the growth of early modern Dutch. Burke ca...