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History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn. By Elizabeth A. Clark. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. x + 325 pp. $39.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.
ELIZABETH CLARK'S HISTORY, THEORY, TEXT: A (SOMEWHAT) CONFESSIONAL READING
Throughout her enormously productive career, Elizabeth Clark has devoted herself to promoting interdisciplinarity within the field of late ancient Christian studies. Clark's latest book-History, Theory, Text-represents a kind of culmination of this long-standing (even long-suffering) effort not only to open her own field to new approaches but also to render it more accessible and relevant to scholars in other disciplines. Like all of her work, this book is as noteworthy for its discipline as it is for its deliberate transgression of disciplinary boundaries. Even more than her prior work, it draws her well beyond the borders of early church history. Here Clark's primary objective is to take account of the implications for the present practice of history-writing of a century or so of theorizing about historiography, undertaken mostly by nonhistorians and, alas, ignored by most historians. The major chapters of the book launch readers on a whirlwind tour that winds from the nineteenthcentury German historians' attempts to defend an objective or "scientific" view of history, to the historiographie reflections of Anglophone analytic philosophers and French structuralists, to the lingering positivism of the Annalistes, microhistorians, and British Marxist historians, to literary critics' challenging interrogation of the narrativity of history-writing, to the emergence of a "new" intellectual history that is complicated and enriched by a multidisciplinary debate regarding the relation of "texts" and "contexts" as well as the centrality of power and ideology in the processes of textual production.
Underlying Clark's critical reflections throughout these chapters is a particular concern with the current status of the study of premodern history. Focusing in the final chapter on the example of her own field, she traces a shift from a theologically based patristics to a history of Christianity that turns aside from theology to engage the questions, methods, and arguments emanating from the social sciences-most notably perhaps, cultural anthropology. Clark suggests that this strong (and in many ways productive) turn to the social sciences is partly responsible for historians' relatively latedawning awareness of the implications of text-focused poststructuralist theories for the practice of historiography....