Henning Trüper

Wild archives Unsteady records of the past in the travels of Enno Littmann

The article examines the scholarly travels of Enno Littmann (1875–1958) in Syria and Ethiopia as providing an alternative model for understanding ‘the archive’ as a theoretical topos in connection with the production of historical knowledge in the 19th century. The argument seeks to dismantle the nexus between classification and modern European statehood – here discussed with the help of Derrida’s Mal d’archive – that has come to dominate debates on the epistemological place of the archive. Instead, the article seeks to sketch an understanding of practical work on plural, collected and textual records of the past in terms of epistemic situations displaying a high degree of spontaneity, thus ‘wildness’. For this purpose, reading procedures, archival material and normative orders purportedly regulating archival work are scrutinized in turn for signs of wildness.

Learning experiences, emulating affects and crafting historicity: Franz Ganshof on Bruges, 1906, 19091

Contributing to the history of the craft of historicisation, the present study explores connections between historical writing and historical experience. These connections are analysed through two youthful documents of historical writing by the Belgian medievalist François Louis Ganshof (1895–1980), dating from his schoolboy days. The brief texts in question yield a unique perspective on the processes of learning and emulation that constituted young Ganshofs practical knowledge of historicisation. This knowledge pertained for example to his use of references to historical objects and works of art, the discursive means of which he disposed for describing actions and events, or, indeed, the affects and passions he inscribed into his juvenile elaborations. Specific modes of deploying history in bourgeois Bruges at the beginning of the twentieth century – modes on which scholarly practices of historical writing had already made their imprint – are shown to have been foundational for this intricate, local and particular constellation. Ganshofs later, ostentatiously dispassionate practice of historical writing was durably informed by his early learning experiences and the affectivity they had forged. The linkage between writing and historical experience was intimate and indissoluble.