Lisa Regazzoni

This article addresses the issue of historical knowledge in relation to material evidence. More specifically, it asks, What objects capture the historian's attention and what knowledge is gained from those objects? What does the historian's gaze select as “things of history” and thus as removed from a world of object assemblages and fluid matter? Is it the case that only artifacts deliberately produced or modified by humans (regardless of the purpose) count as “things of history”? Or do physical entities produced by unintended human and nonhuman factors also display temporal endurance or alteration occurring over time and resonate with humans? Are “things of history” only entities endowed with shape, or do formless materials qualify too? In this article, I outline a theory of intentionality in relation to material items for two main reasons. First, it allows for a “critique of material evidence,” which is still missing in the historical discipline. Second, it enables us to address any remaining epistemological, ethical, or political issues, biases, or contradictions associated with the multifaceted research on material culture that affect the way we do history.

This article examines the emergence of a new epistemic value that was attributed to remnants of the past during the broad debate on historical evidence in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the unintentionality of the testimony. Beginning in the early modern period, growing awareness of the partiality of historical literacy narratives regarded as intentional testimonies as well as growing interest in nonwritten pasts have led to the consideration of other kinds of relics, which have been seen as unwitting and indirect carriers of information about the past. Material and iconographic remains, languages and oral traditions, costumes, and superstitious practices gained currency as “neutral” and “authentic” testimonies of times past. This process is accessed by analyzing the historical evidence par excellence in eighteenth-century France: the monument as material and immaterial remains. Over the course of this period, evidence underwent impressive semantic enhancement and became a polysemic epistemological object. At the time, the term “monument” referred to an intentional mark designed for and entrusted to the future and to unwitting or involuntary evidence of the past, evidence that was later invested with historical value not originally intended by its maker. Although the nineteenth century saw the term “monument” lose its meaning as an unwitting trace of the past, what has survived is the epistemic value of an unintentionality of testimonies, albeit under other conceptual guises such as “remnants,” “witnesses in spite of themselves,” “traces,” and “clues.” What, then, is the usefulness of still imagining unintentionality today for the practice of research and for historical understanding?

Der Selektionsakt ist für das Erzählen konstitutiv. Diese simple These gewinnt an philosophischer Relevanz, lotet man sie bezüglich ihrer ethischen Folgen aus. Für die narrative Sinnbildung ist das Selektieren notwendig und somit eine positive Bedingung. Aber sobald sich die Erzählung zur restlosen Wiedergabe verpflichtet fühlt, angesichts des historisch Geschehenen, so schlägt es in negatives, ungerechtes Ausschließen um. Die Auswahl des Sujets und dessen Darstellung im Werk erweisen sich als das Unvermeidbare, an dem die übernommene Aufgabe zu scheitern droht. Durch die Analyse bestimmter Odysseusvarianten, von Homer über Dante bis Levi, veranschaulicht das Buch, wie die Literatur zur unfreiwilligen Mittäterin eines Unrechts wird.

This article reconsiders the relationship between experience, memory, and iconology in Reinhart Koselleck's thought from an unexpected perspective. It focuses on the lesser-known Reinhart Koselleck Figure Collection donated by the family to Bielefeld University in 2021, which contains about 150 highly diverse artifacts: tin soldiers, busts and monument miniatures, and especially figures of horses and horsemen. Reviewing the collection not in isolation but as part of Koselleck's working and inspirational material allows us to rethink his iconological project through the lens of figural assemblage perspective and, thus, in relation to Aby Warburg's Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, a connection that has hitherto been insufficiently explored. In this light, Koselleck's figure collection, entangled with other media such as print and images, is itself analyzed as evidence of Warburg's influence on his method of assembling historical material.