Setting the Standards ― Institutions, Networks and Communities of National Historiography

This book is devoted to the institutions, networks and communities that ?standardised' the historical discipline and profession, in the nineteenth and twentieth century, in the context of both the old and the new European nation states. Now in paperback, it focuses on the growth of the infrastructure of historiography: the archives, the journals, the biographical dictionaries, the historical museums... It presents the places where historians met one another – sometimes in a formal context, sometimes informally; sometimes in a strictly organised entity, sometimes in looser associations; sometimes with a clear scientific purpose, sometimes for more light-hearted reasons. It finally testifies of the diversity of the writers of history: the university professors of course, working in the hauts lieux of the new historiography, but also less obvious groups such as the clergy, the nobility, women and the exiled historians who continually evoked the past of their abandoned and lost countries.

Jo Tollebeek is Full Professor of Cultural History from 1750 at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He has published work on university history, the history of historiography and the history of the humanities in the nineteenth and twentieth century including Writing the Inquisition in Europe and America (2004); Men of Character. The Emergence of the Modern Humanities (2011) and Henri Pirenne, Historian. A Life in Pictures (2011, with Sarah Keymeulen). He also headed the Belgian lieux de memoire project: Belgie, een parcours van herinnering (2008).

Ilaria Porciani is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and the History of Historiography at the University of Bologna, Italy. She has published on the history of culture, of the university, of historiography, of nationalism and of education, taking a gender approach. Her book La festa della nazione (1997) was awarded the Acqui Storia Prize. She has been editor-in-chief of Il Mestiere di Storico and is a member of the editorial boards of Passato e Presente and the Journal of Modern European History. Since 2010 she has coordinated the Bologna unit of EuNaMus, the Framework 7 European Project on the history of European museums.