The two-sided face of cultural history

di Alessandro Arcangeli
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 40 (2012), p. 11

The undoubted success of cultural history as an international paradigm has not really overcome its fuzzy definition and problematic status as a mode of historical enquiry and writing. New challenges are posed by the increasing relevance of cultural contact and by the need for fully appreciating its role in the past. Helpfully some recent theoretical reflection has proposed new ways of identifying what a specific cultural-historical approach may entail, from the horizon of the possible to a remodelling of the self. A discipline that requires constant reconsideration of the past may thus have also something interesting in store for the foreseeable future.