CRASSH

This first workshop of three which are funded by an AHRC network grant was meant to draw together historians of Naples from the early modern to the modern periods to begin a discussion across chronologies and across disciplines concerning the formation of historical writing on Naples as well as to reflect on alternative models and methodologies, in particular, within cultural history.  Most of the speakers were established scholars in Neapolitan history and several of them reflected directly in their pre-circulated papers on the persistence (and consequences) of certain historiographical tropes and their origins in the early modern period – in particular, the papers of Rao, Marino, Imbruglia and Davis.  These themes necessarily pushed the discussion towards the problems of centring historical writing on Naples around questions of the modern state and its failure, a theme which comes directly from the concerns of modern European historians but has also infiltrated histories of the earlier periods. It was interesting to see the early modernists and modernists trying to find their way through the complexities of this problem, in part, because we are rarely together in the same room but also because of the difficulties of finding alternative paradigms for writing the history of Naples without confronting the social and economic conditions of southern Italy. 

We had left plenty of time for discussion between papers and at the end of the day, and most of the participants made lively and pointed contributions.  In particular, we were pleased that younger scholars from a variety of disciplines were able to discuss directly their own difficulties in placing their work within the limits of existing Neapolitan historiography while wanting to engage with alternative historical methods and theories from outside of that tradition.  There was some discussion about the possibility of avoiding the historiographical tropes on Naples by creating wider frameworks (such as the Mediterranean or the Spanish imperial context) in which to consider the history of Naples or by looking elsewhere for different sources to write that history and by which alternative canons could then be devised.