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The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
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Abstract: In the herein study the author, methodically analyzing the testaments, underlines that the presence of sources represents only a prior “material” condition of history, its task being noticed in the methodical and critical memory, based upon sources. Undoubtedly, history does not represent “the science about sources”. Essential for the research is the remark of their “presence”: the existence of a research issue that should reinstate the source that should update it. Consequently “the source” should be brought in the conscience of the historian as a mean of method, theory and historiography practice, as a product of “experience” –from Weber’s point of view of the term, of knowledge sociology –constituent to historic analysis. Despite the declared exclusive right of the “theory” the historic writing constitutes and “reproduces” itself by the ongoing relatedness of (“primary”) sources to the specialized literature-in the historiography tradition “secondary” information. That is why “Ad fontes-Back to the sources”, although specific to the Renaissance historiography and to the XIX century Positivism does not constitute a perennial metaphor of the historiography, despite its importance in the historiography theory. It is an essential condition of the history as a science. What is really important is that the post-structural theories are centered upon the “text”, although the sources constitute for the historian in the tradition of the discipline the” primary” texts. Among the sources of early modern period the testaments and legal papers were not privileged by the historic research. By their mentioning at the end Arnold put them together with the “documents” defined as “writings created to prepare and put into practice the legal and administrative procedures. Although he remarks the increasing importance of private acts-letters, diaries, biographies, auto-biographies, journey descriptions he does not reflect the evident rapport among private acts-known in the actual German research as “Ego-Dokumente” (documents of the self) and „personal” acts. On one hand, the testaments do not constitute normative texts in the meaning of the initiator –a private person , on the other hand their rapporting to a specific purpose imposes the respect of a normative form necessary to verify their autenticity and the putting into practice of their content by responsible persons through acts that raport to the private area or/and to the extend in which the testament forseeings become object of a civil litigation-in the public-administrative one. In the traditional understanding of the history the so called „ methods of the historic knowledge” are the instruments that show us the way from the interest of knowledge to judgement, from the problem to its solving, from question to answer. Despites their claims, the constructive theories opposed to the classical renovated reconstruction have not succeeded in casting aside, only to confer, changed frameworks to the method by which we arrive to certified information on events and historic connections. The fundamental problem of hermeneutics, the dichotomised relationship between “understanding” and “explanation” remains unchanged, the theoretical paradigms and the practical essays to surpass it, either from micro-history perspective or from that of history culture or meta- history theories of post modernism. The methodological and thematic diversity towards which we aim has a meaning only if this is based on the solid background and critical, methodical valorisation of the sources. |
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