1. Historiography on the Map
This Atlas takes an unconventional approach to the history of historiography in the past two centuries.
When the NHIST project on the Writing of National Histories started in 2003, we undertook the task of dealing with the institutional aspects of national historiographies. We began by investigating historiography’s deep roots in the institutions, as well as the networks and the more or less formal communities of specialized scholars, from the earlier amateurs and gentlemen historians to the professionals of today. With a few earlier exceptions, infrastructures for historians first appeared in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, setting frameworks and models which have proved fundamental for further development in our continent and beyond. The making of a profession and the shaping of a well-structured discipline in the broader field of the humanities is the central theme of this Atlas.
When beginning our project, we had in mind Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel – a fascinating read which prompted the exploration of new paths and new perspectives. Moretti’s approach to the nineteenthand twentieth-century novel hinged on spaces. The area of the novel was translated into maps, and the maps threw new light on otherwise obscure corners, often suggesting the need to rethink some obvious, passively received ideas and auctoritas.
We began to think that we, too, could translate the history-producing institutions into cartographic images and use them as references with which to organize a comparative study on this subject. What better format than a map could express the European-wide developments in academic chairs and teaching programmes, centres of research, reviews, associations, and history museums? What better than a map could furnish a first direct overview of the European cultural space with regard to the production of history, making Europe the real focus, and not just some better-known parts of it?
Rather than ‘spotlighting’ the major countries, leaving the rest in shadow, as usually happens, we decided to cast bright light on each country. Quoting the authority of the Oxford English Dictionary we wanted to avoid having them ‘off the map’: that is‚ ‘in oblivion or an insignificant position; of no account’. Instead, we wanted to bring all countries ‘onto the map’, that is, place them ‘in an important or pre-eminent position’.
This entailed enlarging the scope, adopting a wider gaze, by studying the development of countries against the backdrop of a multiplicity of situations: empires, older nation-states, countries with stronger cultural identities, be they already nation-states – like France – or still conglomerates of different small states like Italy or Germany. But this also concerned countries which in the middle of the nineteenth century were still endeavouring to construct a written national language – like Bulgaria – or slowly emerging from relative but pronounced backwardness as peripheries of the Ottoman Empire. Such countries were extremely large or very small, but for all of them the issue of nationalism, and therefore of national history, was crucial, often controversial, and sometimes divisive, as still today in countries like Cyprus.
Our aim was to consider the development of the basic structures of historiography in countries where socialism had built Soviet-like structures for the promotion and the control of historiography, and in rich Western countries, which have always devoted resources to the development of cultural institutions. We wanted to compare developments in the East and the West, in dictatorships and democracies, and to understand the situations of states that arose from the Soviet bloc or in some cases – such as Albania – from enduring situations of extreme cultural isolation.
A comprehensive description of Europe as a whole would furnish information on all these aspects and prepare the ground for further research. When we started, we found that all the necessary information was lacking, notwithstanding the broad syntheses already existing in the literature. Indeed, with a few exceptions, not even the basic data on the number of historians in a given country were available.
At the end of this long journey, now compiled is a compact database which has enabled the construction, first of a set of European maps, and then additional maps for each country, in the two parts of the Atlas. The purpose of the European maps presented in the first part of the book is to provide a broader perspective and suggest comparisons. A series of short contributions both comment on and integrate the information by suggesting further questions that could and should be asked. They focus on the relationship between historiography and politics, and the significance of other ‘institutions’ such as historical bibliographies or dictionaries, or also book collections, which have left strong imprints on historical culture.
Modern historical scholarship, in all its complexity, needs institutional support. The staffs of teaching or research institutions must be paid, seminar rooms must be constructed and maintained, libraries and archives must be run efficiently so that researchers have access to their contents. The making of the profession cannot be understood without taking a close look at the building of this infrastructure for higher education and research.
When mapping the institutional framework of historiography, we focused on these institutions. We identified the issues, and we drew up a questionnaire to submit to our authors on six main aspects: archives, tenured professionals at universities and other academies or (later) major public research institutions; historical journals, associations; and finally museums, a topic usually entirely ignored by histories of historiography. While work was progressing, a systematic inventory of associations proved rather difficult, and we decided not to plot the results for the entire continent on the maps, notwithstanding the very rich, though quite varied, amount of information that we gathered for almost all countries. The current state of research is too fragmentary for a complete cartography on a European scale to be possible. Instead, we chose to depict specific phases (the 1870s and the 1950s) in the development of historical associations for those areas where sufficient information was available. The reader will therefore only find systematic cartographic representation of archives and museums, and of the places where professional historians – that is, tenured staff with permanent jobs or posts – have been active.
Individual entries for each European country provide more detailed information, both on the issues made visible by the maps and on issues specific to the country and therefore not suitable for mapping at European level.
The process of professionalization and the creation of the discipline of history in modern terms developed during the age of nation-building. Yet it would have been erroneous to restrict our investigation to the writing of national history, as other volumes in the series have chosen to do. The creation of a national framework for the production of history and the emergence of an independent historical profession are two sides of a complex phenomenon which began in connection with the nation but thereafter extended far beyond it. We consequently decided to extend our gaze to the entirety of the ‘historical field’ in Bourdieu’s sense, without restricting our attention to what was immediately apparent in national history. We accordingly decided to concentrate on the construction of a national space for historical research, rather than on institutions devoted exclusively to the study of ‘national’ history.
The time span considered in our overview is very extensive. It begins with early significant innovations, such as those introduced by the French Revolution and the first university reforms, and it ends in 2005. Because no comprehensive data were available when we started our project, we could not hope to collect data for more than 200 years; rather, we had to proceed in steps of about 25 years each, so that a series of nine European maps visualizes changes and trends over more than two centuries. Thus each map can be likened to a ‘snapshot’, or to a still taken from a much longer film. The years – 1812, 1830, 1850, 1875/78, 1900, 1928, 1955, 1980, 2005 – were chosen so that the effects of crucial political events such as revolutions or wars could be observed when they had had time to crystallize, avoiding years of particular turmoil which would have negatively affected the availability of data.
We decided to plot our data for 1875 on a map showing the political borders of 1878 after the treaty of Berlin had established new independent states in South-Eastern Europe. More specifically, the year 1928 and subsequent ones were chosen as the dates of the ICHS world historical conferences, given that these have marked important stages in international scholarly exchange.
2. Historical scholarship, Nation-Building and the European state system
The development of modern historiography in Europe is closely bound up with the history of nation-building, but also with the story of the European state system. The making of the modern state machinery – from military to administrative to cultural – lies behind the professionalization of history and the establishment of national fields of knowledge. The organization of culture and science has always been an essential part of state activities.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, states were the main organizers of higher education in general, and history in particular. They provided the funds for the creation of chairs, and they established and organized public archives. By introducing history as a compulsory subject in an often entirely new school system, they created the largest professional clientele for the teaching of history at university level. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, throughout continental Europe but at different rates in different countries, the bulk of students who chose history wanted to become school teachers, and they were expected to teach mainly their national histories from a European, unspoken, but obviously Eurocentric perspective.
The intellectual and institutional trends in European historiography intermingled amid the tensions and dynamics inherent to the coexistence of empires and nations characteristic of the last two centuries of European history. Although nation-building provided one of the most powerful motivations and inspirations for the development of historiography, it should not be forgotten that multinational empires like those of the Habsburg, Romanov or Ottoman dynasties created and controlled the institutional framework for the development of the professional and academic teaching and learning of the new discipline until 1918.
The quest for hegemony among the so-called ‘great powers’ that survived the Napoleonic Wars – France, Britain, Prussia, the Habsburg Empire and Russia – and which dominated diplomatic and military affairs in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, was also a cultural quest, in that competition and cooperation were the two sides of international relations among scholars and scientists. Hence the question as to what language was used by historians in the making of the profession, and when a new field of scholarship was under construction, must be viewed in the light of national and imperial competition.
On the eve of the period considered here, French was largely used by the many intellectuals who also engaged in the writing of history, in Eastern as well as Western Europe, and in Spain, Portugal, and Italy besides. German, given the prominent role of German-speaking communities in many Eastern European areas, was also an important language for communication among historians, not only in Central Europe but also in its Eastern part. A knowledge of French and German, and additionally English, Italian or Russian, was commonplace among professional historians until the First World War. The twentieth century saw the rise of English and Russian as common languages in parallel with the rise of the USA and the Soviet Union. French defended its status as the language of diplomacy but lost ground as a means of international communication among historians, as it did in other fields of the humanities.
The spread of these common languages was partly the effect of the cultural politics of the empires in Central and Eastern Europe, whose interest in historiography often preceded that of the national movements. At the imperial universities of Kharkov, Odessa, Dorpat, Lemberg or Czernovitz, chairs of history were created with German and Russian as the main languages of instruction. In Habsburg Italy, history was more often systematically taught than in other areas of the country, notwithstanding a long cultural tradition: not by chance, it was in Habsburg Italy that the seminar made its first appearance in the peninsula.
In Eastern Europe, nation-states did not become dominant political forces in the shaping of European historiography until the Versailles Treaty. Indeed, their institutional triumph in the mid-1990s can be regarded as a very belated victory.
However, after the First World War the nation-state became the predominant means of organizing government and political participation throughout Europe, and historiography remained closely linked to the history of the new and old nation-states. The search for the ancient origins and heroic beginnings of nations popularized by the national romanticism of the nineteenth century was succeeded by the national sagas of contemporary history – a process which culminated in the history of the Two World Wars, Nazi and Soviet occupation, and national liberations in 1944/45 and 1989/90. Therefore, the national framework was still both intellectually and institutionally the ‘backbone’ of the profession, although other topics like European history or global or international history have received closer attention in the past two or three decades.
As said, since 1800, states have furnished the bulk of the institutions needed by professional historians, whose working conditions and incomes have been largely if not completely determined by state administrations, and by political decisions of parliaments or governments in regard to the funding of archives, universities, institutes or research projects. The infrastructure of history must be seen as resulting from a long process of public investment in a historical culture of the state. European states have spent much more than their counterparts in other world regions on this infrastructure, but there still exist pronounced differences in Europe, particularly between the economically rich and culturally older states and the new and poor ones, with France and Albania representing the two extremes. But also to be observed are periods of plenty and of austerity for historiography. The long nineteenth century was in general a period of plenty as states invested in the infrastructures of historical culture, built museums, archives and universities, and funded source editions. Private funding did the rest. The inter-war period was a period when state resources were much scarcer, under the twofold impact of inflation and war debts, and this shortage of resources restricted the ambitious plans that new and old states, the winners and losers of the war, developed in favour of national historiography. As Jerzy Centkowski points out in his overview of Poland’s development in this Atlas, the first years of the independent Polish state were also years of difficulties for research. Funds soon proved inadequate, and scientific societies and historical journals experienced great difficulties. However, this pattern cannot be generalized to all countries: for instance, the French crisis was not mirrored in Italy, where fascism established a number of new institutions. The boom years between 1948 and 1973 were again years of plenty – with the obvious differences – in Eastern and Western Europe. Yet the economic crisis and the problem of state finances returned in the 1980s, and they are still present.
A final consideration concerns the fate of historians and their institutions when states are dissolved. After 1918, German, Hungarian or Austrian historians in the nation-states newly established on the territories of the three Eastern empires lost their administrative support: many of them were forced to leave their jobs at universities, archives or libraries because new states took control of the territories and the institutions of higher education. Shifts of state boundaries again affected many historians after the Second World War, and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In all these cases, the institutions themselves, their resources and traditions, partly migrated with these scholars and partly remained in place. Hence an often complicated and hidden ‘histoire croisée’ between old and new places and professionals began. The historiography of the Baltic region, of the borderlands of Germany, Poland or Hungary, are striking examples of these very complex relationships.
The Atlas takes account of the cultural and political impact of the nationstate on the making of the profession, but it rejects an apologetic or teleological view of the nation-centred institutionalization of historiography since 1800. Thus, the division of the second part of the Atlas among present-day states has been made mostly for practical reasons, and it should not be taken as suggesting any teleology whatsoever. Moreover, the issues of the struggle for scientific autonomy, independence from direct political control, or of critical approaches in historiography, and even the attempt to provide a critical approach to the controversial question of national master narratives, are recurrent themes in the texts commenting on the European maps in the first part of the Atlas. And they integrate the information contained in the second part of the Atlas by suggesting other, closely connected issues.
3. History and Politics
More generally, the relationship between history and politics has been both close and complicated since the profession’s formation first began. During the nineteenth century, before the onset of professionalization, a considerable number of historians engaged in state affairs as members of parliaments and political clubs, some of them as ministers or advisers to governments. This phenomenon cannot be depicted by this Atlas, because of the institutional scope of the narratives and because they concentrate on the bulk and omit ‘great individualities’. However, it should be borne in mind that, in a more systematic way until the First World War, the authoritarian monarchies in Russia and the Ottoman Empire – earlier in the Habsburg Empire, Prussia and elsewhere – created infrastructures for the production of historiography (the royal historiographers), the purpose being to write the history of the empire or the state. On the other hand, they also used censorship and control over historians to prevent historiography from being exploited by their opponents and critics. In some cases, however, the situation was more complex, and ‘national’ historians worked within enterprises protected or partially funded by rulers certainly not interested in the national issue, which was seen as a threat. The situation was more complex under liberal regimes. The twentieth-century dictatorships not only created infrastructures for the control of historiography but often staffed them with members of the apparatus who adhered to the official version and found privileged positions in the academies of sciences. In the countries studied, the dictatorships also threatened, in different ways and with different results, the freedom of research and intellectuals, and more specifically of historians. We asked our authors to furnish information in regard to this problem, and we also commissioned or wrote short texts to illustrate it.
The political and ideological use of historiography was of crucial importance for the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes established in Europe from 1917 to 1990. The transformation of professional historiography into a political ‘weapon’ was an ambitious undertaking pursued by loyal historians and their political masters. More often than one might imagine, however, they failed, because the rules of the historian’s craft precluded open manipulation of the sources. Hence silence was one of the compromises reached between the rulers and the profession, or the encouragement and financing of specific research projects, and the publication of specific sources. But contemporary
historians have had to accept much more direct control: as in the case of the socialist countries, where crucial facts could not be mentioned or studied. Therefore, in many parts of Europe, from Spain and Portugal to Russia via Italy, Germany, Poland or Hungary, professional history had to develop under conditions of limited freedom of expression and research.
We asked our authors to reflect on this issue in their texts, and a number of chapters furnish concise but nevertheless important evidence on the questions of persecution and exile, or of the tragic fates of historians – Nicolae Iorga for example killed in 1940 – often appointed to prestigious positions of highest responsibility. Another aspect worth mentioning concerns selfcensorship and silence. This issue can be followed throughout our reconstruction, since the professors were forced to abandon their countries in the nineteenth century, often finding new inspiration in their host countries, whether the United Kingdom or France, or – in the twentieth century – even Turkey, where some German refugees found refuge and innovated teaching and scholarship, or the United States or Australia. There, countries without freedom could have their histories investigated, written, and discussed. Not surprisingly, therefore, in order to find expertise on countries like Belarus or Ukraine, we had to turn to colleagues now working in Toronto, Edmonton or the United States.
The end of the dictatorships created a profound hiatus and a clear discontinuity. It raised the problem of ‘purging’ those who had served as agents of the dictatorships, which is a history with a European dimension when one considers 1945 and the end of the Nazi regime and its fascist or rightist allies in Europe. In 1989/90, with the end of the socialist regimes, the problem once again arose on a European scale.
4. Monuments to the nation: Museums and archives
States, and in particular nation-states, were interested in the historical discourse, while they tended, in the nineteenth as well as the twentieth century, to erect monuments to the nation-state. Monumental and representative archive and museum buildings, often set in prominent urban spaces, testify to this concern. Moreover, at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was not unusual for an overlap to occur between the notion of monument and that of document: sources for the national history were often presented as monuments to the nation, while the new museums contributed significantly to the direct or indirect celebration of its history.
Although museums have been systematically ignored by the traditional histories of historiography – or at most considered to be examples of the public use of history – it is important to emphasize their close relationship with an interest in history, the development of research, the formation of networks and groups of scholars, and also the creation of minor archives, as well as the role of museums in the public use of history.
Besides university and research institutions, museums have for almost two centuries been crucial ‘workshops’ for the construction of historical master narratives, often concentrated on the nation, and delivered to an ever larger public in the form of pedagogical displays, but more recently increasingly in the form of commodities. Their story is often intertwined with that of associations, and their activity has developed along lines which often mark their contiguity to, if not their identification with, archives. Moreover, museums have established links with much broader audience than those reached by history journals and lectures, or other academic activities. This applies to the nineteenth as well as the twentieth century.
In analysing these institutions we have paid attention to the agencies behind them. In the case of museums this is a particularly interesting issue, but also a very complex one. It is easy to identify historical museums, the purpose of which is to represent the entire history of the nation-state, or more often the nation. Yet examples of this comprehensive type of museum are relatively rare. In countries where the heritage is overwhelming and the number of museums of archaeology and art is remarkable, little need has been felt to construct national historical museums. This applies to countries like Italy and Spain. But also Britain – perhaps for different reasons – has not developed a national historical museum of this kind. Indeed, the British Museum is anything but British. And within the Spanish state it is Catalonia which has developed a historical museum, in connection with the issue of autonomy and as an assertion of national identity and dignity. But foundations totally ex novo, like the Berlin Deutsches Historisches Museum or the Museu d’Història de Catalunia, are rare. More often, behind them lay a stratification of different collections, agents and fundings where different social milieus and different levels (the city, the region) mixed and overlapped in the course of decades, if not of centuries. We excluded pure art museums from our survey and used historical presentation as the criterion for selection. However, exceptions had constantly to be made, and a rigid typology with firm distinctions proved extremely difficult to develop.
Our maps are based on a simple typology that allows comparisons beyond the specificities of each case. The diversified population of historical museums had been classified into those of general, nationwide or even international interest and those of regional or local scope; but only the national level could – for quite simple cartographic reasons – be represented on our maps. National museums were classified following a typology that reflected main trends in writing and representing the nation’s past in Europe. One category – labelled ‘political’ – comprised museums focused on the political and military past, as well as on the nation-building process. A second category – labelled ‘cultural’ – comprised museums displaying the cultural heritage as a whole. The third one – termed ‘comprehensive’ – included museums which combined the two dimensions of nation-building and the national heritage: a rather common category, given that in a number of cases newer national master narratives were added to a more general and older national museum structure.
The European map for 1830 evidences two main cases. The focus in France is trained, on the one hand, on the nation in arms as represented by a series of paintings about wars and victories; and, on the other, on the cultural nation as represented by its ancient monuments. On the same map, the model of the Heimatmuseen in the Habsburg Empire appears important, and rich with future potential.
After the failure of the 1848 Revolutions, 1852 and 1854 were years of innovation in the German states. Not only the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (1852) but also the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum were built as clearly cultural museums intended to represent the cultural nation. To cite just two further examples, in Norway the national museum concentrated on the history of glorious naval battles, while Portugal did not innovate but instead built a rather traditional – albeit new in that country – military museum.
The last decades of the century registered an important change, for different reasons, in various areas of the Continent. The most impressive phenomenon was a new wave of nation-building museums in Greece and in Italy with striking similarities in their origins if not in their extent. Military or artillery museums were founded, respectively in 1878 and 1893, also in Belgrade, in the same year as Serbia’s independence, and in the new Kingdom of Romania twelve years after independence. Reasons of representation and a general European trend probably prompted creation of the new museum of the cultural nation in Lisbon, which focused on archaeology and the rich remains of Portugal’s golden age. Russia, too, saw an impressive wave of new museographic foundations, which probably also prompted the creation of the Kraków historical museum. In the Nordic countries, the example of Skansen (1891) was emulated two years later by Norway; while in Finland – then under Russian rule – a Seurasaari open air museum was created in 1908. Only much later would such a museum be founded in Latvia (Brīvdabas Musejs, 1924). The model of the regional Heimatmuseum was also adopted to some extent in Spain, although in that country the focus was still more closely on art and archaeology. But it was imitated most of all in Central as well as Northern and Eastern Europe, and notably also in the Soviet Union, both for regional museums and for museums of the various republics. The new socialist regime created these new museums as didactic tools for the political instruction of a still largely illiterate population, and as the institutional basis for a new kind of historical culture addressed to school classes, youth groups and worker brigades, instead of the educated upper classes that had visited the tsarist museums.
Our database for 1928 also comprises, on the one hand, the founding of a state historical museum devoted to Russian political history in Leningrad; and, on the other, the Imperial War Museum in London, the first in a long series – but beyond any doubt the most popular – to be created in regard to the First World War. The same map also helps visualize the institutions created in the new nation-states after the Great War: Belarus, Estonia (War Museum), Lithuania, and Romania (the new National Military Museum).
In the newly founded Republic of Turkey, a new wave of museums concerned themselves not only with archaeology from the pre-Islamic past but also with ethnography, as described in the text on this country. Only later did the pervasive creation of Atatürk museums celebrate the father of the nation both nationally and – most significantly – at regional and local level.
In 1955 the creation of the federal state of Yugoslavia was mirrored to some extent – and with evident priorities – in museums established in the republics of Yugoslavia such as the Museum of the First Serbian Uprising (1954–66), or, in Priština, the museum of Kosovo, significantly transformed in 1977 into the Museum of the Revolution. Everywhere in the Soviet bloc, alongside giant monuments and memorials, and often intertwined with them, museums celebrated the heroic – often labelled ‘great’ – ‘Patriotic War’: examples are the Belarusian State Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk; or the Slovakia Museum of the National Uprising (1955). Workers and socialist museums, such as the Klements Gottwald museum of the labour movement in Prague, also started to appear.
The equally rich Western European scene witnessed the creation of museums of the Resistance, often controversial and never achieving national status, as in Italy, or celebrating a ‘national’ and consolatory self-representation as in Norway. Some of them should be investigated within the larger context of the historical institutions founded by political families, or with the involvement of local administrations. Once again, the local, regional and national levels often overlapped, while the state and other agencies competed for the construction of a political, often national, memory. A short text alongside the 2005 map deals in more detail with recent developments.
Much has been written about the close connection between the opening of archives and the new historical production. The reorganization of archives and their centrality as the core of historical research orientated historiography were based largely on the documents conserved in them, which mainly concerned the history of the state.
The state has played a crucial role in the field of archives also by educating
– often in newly founded ‘schools’ – and appointing specialized staff to order the document series and render them consultable through inventories; and finally by opening the archives not only to a general ‘public’ of individuals often interested in quite personal issues but also to scholars frequently concerned to study the history of the nation. There were restrictions, however, which should be borne in mind, and which all professional historians know from experience. The maps of 1830, 1850 and 1875 show the very slow opening of the archives to their new professional clientele. They represent only those state archives that actually admitted historians and at the same time were prepared to issue the documents requested from them. The French case exemplifies the problem.
From an administrative point of view, France’s archival structure had already arisen in the last years of the eighteenth century. However, the actual opening of the archives was a much slower process. The construction of a reading room was essential for the politically proclaimed opening of archives to become a practical reality. However, this opening took place only slowly. Therefore, in our maps the bulk of French departmental archives only appear, with just a few exceptions, in 1875, in spite of the fact that a law had theoretically opened them to the public in the years of the French Revolution. The last state to make its archives available to historians was modern Turkey, which opened the archives of the Ottoman Empire, previously de facto closed to all but state historiographers and a handful of loyal scholars.
Inspection of the sequence of the maps shows clearly that the administrative organization of archives has always depended heavily on the constitutional order of the state. Federal states like Switzerland and Germany, or ones with long traditions of administrative autonomy of their historical provinces or parts like the Netherlands or Spain, have preserved a decentralized structure, adding a new central archival service for ongoing administrative affairs, thereby creating a secondary structure that became important for contemporary history. A case in point is Germany, where the Reichsarchiv collected documents on state affairs from the foundation of the German Empire in 1871 onwards.
But the majority of states did follow the pattern of centralizing their state archives and organizing them by starting at the centre – often the capital city – and then slowly extending the process to the periphery or provinces, thus following the pattern of the French administration.
As a result, the maps of the nineteenth century exhibit remarkable differences, on the one hand, between centralized archival services and federal structures, and on the other, between countries where a complex system of provincial and central archives could be used by professional historians and those where this provincial level was not yet available or necessary.
Thus, in countries like Switzerland, only few changes took place in the twentieth century, with the exception of archives of a new kind conserving new types of sources such as audio-visual materials. The Swiss map shows 29 archives in 1928, 31 in 1980 and 32 in 2005. Similar growth is to be observed in Germany or Italy.
During the twentieth century, the European maps of archives clearly evidence the heavy effects of state bureaucratization. Everywhere, administrative routines since the nineteenth century had produced kilometres and tons of archival documents. Commissions were appointed to reorganize the storage and administration of this growing and overwhelming mass of administrative paperwork. Behind those maps and the growing number of archives and archivists lay the drama of contemporary history and its sources: the selection, destruction or concealment of many state documents because they might provide evidence of crimes, the ideological falsification of history, or breaches of civil rights by the state.
After the First World War new archives were created in the new nationstates, so that the already-existing structures in the same areas within empires were expanded. After the Second World War, this general trend continued, with remarkable growth rates in Eastern European countries.
Between 1955 and 2005, numerous countries enacted special legislation on archives which generated a visible and systematic growth of archives and made them the most pervasive institutions among those mapped in our cartography. In Italy, there were 19 archives in 1928; 27 in 55; but 97 in 1980 and 113 in 2005. A similar growth, with a similar time scale and almost with the same pace took place in Spain (15 archives in 1928; 46 in 1955; 60 in 1980 and 71 in 2005) and in the United Kingdom (16 in 1928; 50 in 1955; 69 in 1980; 73 in 2005).
But the landscape of archives slowly changed in the last decades of the twentieth century under the impact of the collection of every kind of document to do with contemporary history. State papers increasingly became just one variety of sources together with photographs, film reels, radio recordings, and oral testimonies in media of various kinds. Other historical agents like enterprises, associations and universities have their own archives or consign their documents to specialized archives administered by private organizations or public foundations. Our maps can only to some extent mirror the new pluralism, which will become more visible in detail when the entire database is published on a website.
5. From amateur to Professional: the Birth of a Craft
On looking at the European maps from 1812 to 1900, one is struck by the early introduction of historiography on university curricula in Northern Europe, and by the continuity of a number of positions and institutions. Not only did the regius historiographers continue to occupy their places close to the seats of political power, but in countries like Sweden or France one can detect a clear continuity in university history teaching. The institutions where chairs in this discipline were established ranged from Dublin and Edinburgh via Berlin to Saint Petersburg, Moscow and Kazan. However, the features of this historiography were not uniform in this Northern rim of Europe: a strong tradition of pragmatic historiography centred on state affairs and princes became integrated into a broader university curriculum useful for state officials. Therefore, on the one hand, general or state history was established as pertaining to political science – or Kameralistik as it was called in German – and with strong ties to the study of law and the history of law: a feature especially salient during the late Enlightenment and in autocratic but enlightened monarchies like Austria and Russia. On the other hand, a younger intellectual tradition developed in this institutional context: that of German historicism with its stronger emphasis on specialization and methodology and its intellectual preference for tradition and gradual change. In all these countries, other institutions like archives and academies were founded contemporaneously, and they set about forging a new professionality for the new professional knowledge of history.
In the nineteenth century, generally speaking, history was taught by one, two, later three full professors at a university. This arrangement paved the way to a first division of tasks whereby one chair was dedicated to general or universal history, and the other to a more specific topic like Austrian history, ancient, or medieval and modern history. In 1875 this was the situation at the University of Berlin, where the chair of history held by Droysen was flanked by three chairs, each dedicated to one of the three canonical periods (ancient, medieval, and modern). In the same year, the four chairs in history at Göttingen were allocated to history & medieval history, history & modern history, classical philology & ancient history, and auxiliary sciences.
In 1875, the majority of chairs (166 out of 268) in Europe were still without any temporal let alone disciplinary specification. But the chronological division gained ground: in 1900, 47 per cent of all chairs on which information about their denomination is available (479 out of 522) had a temporal specification: 45 per cent of them were dedicated to ancient history or its adjunct disciplines, 44 per cent to modern and contemporary history, and 32 per cent to medieval history (the sum is more than 100 percent because a number of chairs combined two of the three periods). Everywhere, the auxiliary sciences had gained in importance, and they were represented by a specific chair at all the larger universities (81 chairs in 1900 = 17 per cent). These chairs were often connected with the teaching of medieval history, so that this subdiscipline occupied a stronger position than the 32 per cent may suggest.
The positivist turn undergone by the discipline in the last decades of the nineteenth century largely favoured this division of chairs reflecting the specific methods and technical skills needed for the different periods. The next subdisciplines to be represented by their own chairs were national history (85 chairs or 18 per cent in 1900), regional history (6 chairs or 1 per cent) and economic and social history (6 chairs or 1 per cent in 1900). All three denominations became more numerous in the inter-war period, but this increase did not alter the established pattern of largely unspecified posts in history teaching and the growing importance of the demarcations between the three main subdisciplines: ancient, medieval, and modern & contemporary history. It was only after the Second World War that further specialization reflecting thematic or geographical differences started very slowly. But it should not be forgotten that in 1955, as in 2005, 75 per cent of all professional posts had no thematic specification at all.
The chronological partition remained the most important filter for the distribution of professional positions: in 1955, 58 per cent, and in 2005 69 per cent of posts had a temporal specification. The relative weight of the established subdisciplines changed during the general growth of the discipline. Ancient history lost ground: historians working in this subdiscipline numbered 276 in 1955 and 1880 in 2005 (both representing 15 per cent of posts with a chronological denomination). Medieval history represented about one fifth of positions (367 in 1955 and 2330 in 2005), but after the Second World War the majority of new posts were dedicated to modern and contemporary history (815 = 43 per cent in 1955, and 8189 = 67 per cent in 2005); the history of the nineteenth and twentieth century alone accounted for 29 and 32 per cent of all positions with a temporal specification in 1955 and 2005.
But in the Soviet Union and the socialist countries, university chairs and teaching positions were defined along much narrower thematic and chronological lines, in accordance with the trend towards further specialization in research institutes. Chairs were dedicated to, for example, ‘Oriental history in the twentieth century’, ‘social and economic history of twentieth-century South-East Europe’ or ‘Russian history 1900–1917’.
This trend is also apparent in the Western European countries. In some cases, behind an extreme variety of denominations there lay an institutional subterfuge. It was sometimes impossible to create new posts – not even in general history – in order to increase staff, and the only possible solution was to create new denominations and new lectureships, if not chairs proper.
However, even in 2005, teaching posts in history at most European universities were not highly specialized: only the chronological demarcations among the now four main subdisciplines were more or less rigid, while thematic or methodological specialization was only an additional element. The profile of each department or institution was more the effect of individual preferences and specializations than of institutional framing. This is indubitably an important factor in explaining the flexibility of the discipline in its response to new trends in research and public debate in European historiography; trends that during the last three decades have been characterized by a series of striking turns and shifts in orientation towards new themes and methods.
Moreover, the social history of professionalization has still to be written: our database does not contain information about the social origins or backgrounds of the persons whose names had been registered because our knowledge is often scant, and only a small number of studies cast light on the role of the clergy and nobility in the nineteenth century, even less on the social origins of the new professionals of the twentieth century, their bourgeois or middle-class (more seldom working-class or peasant) backgrounds. At present, information on these matters can be only gathered on the basis of biographies or autobiographies.
Mapping the gendered aspects of the profession was much easier. We explored this theme because of its importance for the social history of the profession. Gender is analysed in a systematic fashion not only in our maps but also in the narrative texts for almost every country. We have provided for the first time a comprehensive chronology of the changing role and status of men and women in the historical profession throughout Europe. It is clearly a profession that from its earliest stages has been shaped by gender. The implications of the gender balance within the history community has only been recognized and debated in recent decades. For this reason it seemed particularly important to have, country by country, more precise statistical data on this phenomenon.
To suggest that the historical profession was exclusively male in its early formation is almost a truism. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, history was defined by many intellectuals and statesmen as ‘a thing for statesmen, not for men of letters. Or rather for men who possess both faculties’, because it was perceived as crucial ‘for national public opinion, which rules Statesmen and men of War’. We also know that in the seminar, the forum that was developed for the research and teaching of history, there was initially no place for women, even when it was held in the professors’ home. This will not come as a surprise. As our authors make clear in their individual contributions, women were only gradually admitted into university life, and, in some countries, restrictions continued to be imposed for many years on their ability to take examinations and to graduate. In the 1880s and 1890s, universities in Denmark, Finland and Sweden were among the first to permit women to study for PhDs. Other countries followed at different dates. In Coimbra, Portugal, women had gained access to university education in the 1880s; in the Netherlands in 1889; in Budapest in 1893; in Bavaria in 1903; Württemberg in 1905; Sachsen in 1906 and Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1909. In Ireland Constantia Maxwell (born in 1886) was one of the first women to attend Trinity College Dublin when it was opened to women as late as 1904. A similar situation can be documented in France where the Ecole des Chartes only opened to women in 1906.
Against this background it is not surprising that our database does not document any woman with a permanent position in the historical profession in 1900. Indeed, 1928 is the first year when women appear among tenured staff. They were, however, still rare and limited to a small number of countries. The data also indicates that even in countries where there were women historians in employment, there was only one per country such as in Italy, France, Czechoslovakia, Finland and Latvia. There were three women historians in the Irish Free State, which can be explained by the late development of history as a university discipline and the establishment of a new academic elite in the early twentieth century. Of the three women academics with a permanent position in Germany, one was engaged in the editing of primary sources for the well-known Monumenta Germaniae Historica, while two others had such a low rank that they did not fulfil the criteria for inclusion in our database. A relatively high number of women – in comparison with the West – were enrolled in the socialist countries of Eastern and Central Europe, as a consequence of contrasting policies on the employment of women. However, even there, the imbalance was clear: 9 women to 133 men.
In Ukraine women historians were even more numerous in absolute numbers as well as by percentage: 14 women against 143 men. They were present in different institutions, in Kiev and Kharkov, including the Academy of Sciences, the Archaeographical CISTOY Commission and also the Institute for Marxism-Leninism in Kharkov. Their expertise was also used in various fields ranging among archaeology, history of culture or history and philology and Ukrainian history. Some of them engaged in research and teaching on the history of the Communist Party and the October Revolution in Ukraine. Again, they were mostly research fellows and not professors.
The 1928 figure for Britain – 40 women historians permanently employed out of a total of 201 permanent staff in history – has no parallel in European countries. It is the result of the creation of separate women’s colleges at Cambridge, London and Oxford. This is confirmed by a closer inspection of the data for 1928: 27 of these women were employed in academic posts in London and the Oxbridge colleges. In 1955 the numbers increased, and even more so in 1980 and in 2005, as is clear from the graphs and maps included in the Atlas.
A common argument concerning women in the professions is that they are usually employed at the lowest levels. This may be also a truism, but we believed that it was important to demonstrate it with numbers and at a Europe wide level. The decades after the Second World War exhibit a clear growth in absolute numbers. However, this is not particularly significant as the absolute increase in the total of the academics is less marked as there was not a corresponding growth in female employment. In the history profession, as in other disciplines, in spite of the general growth in the total number of academics, is the number of female academics very relevant, given the booming years of the educational institutions. But the figure for women does not increase in percentage. Rather, it tends to decline.
The situation is even clearer if we look more closely at the different ranking of male / female permanent staff. Once more we find a large number of women researchers, against a much smaller number of women occupying the top positions in the academic career.
6. Networks of Communication: Journals, associations, international Conferences
Communication was already important in the cultural field in the early modern age. But the growing importance of the public sphere, increases in literacy, and the development of communication in national languages have been extreme since the early nineteenth century. History, as a crucial subject for all cultivated people, started to be discussed in generalistic periodicals, not infrequently in connection with national issues, but indirectly, especially when they had pronounced political implications and linked the cultural field with that of politics, the quest for a constitution and independence. However, the nineteenth century also witnessed the birth of more specialized periodicals devoted only to historical themes. Historical journals of this type arose in many countries where a community of professional historians did not yet exist, and they were aimed at a much larger public. Even journals which devoted much space to the publication of sources or documents were supported by a broad audience of wealthy members of the bourgeoisie and nobility, who took an interest in historical matters and often animated the activities of historical Vereine or associations – local, regional, or (more rarely in this early phase) national. Professionalization meant that all these journals were replaced by new ones, and new formats were invented to serve the needs of debates among professionals. Journals became the essential institutions for setting the standards and drawing the demarcation line between the new professionals and the amateurs.
When collecting information about journals, we asked our authors to be as specific as possible concerning the scope of a journal and its links with associations or academic institutions. The use of national languages was also – mostly for the nineteenth century – a matter of reflection: the Bohemian lands provide a good example. But the issue of the language is important today as well, since English is also taking over, and in several countries journals in English have started to appear; while the Web is also a powerful means of communication alternative to the printed medium. Our inquiry covered the period between 2003 and 2005. But in recent years online history journals have been created, thus making the localization of journals even more difficult, as they exploit the potential of virtual space.
The number and scope of journals should be assessed in light of the size of the historians’ community. When we learn from our data that there are eighteen tenured historians in Iceland and four history journals – one of them directly supported by the state – it is obvious that they are addressed to a public much larger than the community of Icelandic historians. At the other extreme, when a journal for contemporary history, namely Passato e Presente, has 400 subscribers, plus a certain amount of copies sold in bookshops, and individual articles can be accessed online through the publisher’s website, this means that it attracts the attention of only ‘professionals’ in the field.
We have already mentioned the role of associations in establishing the first historical museums and journals. In the nineteenth century, associations were crucial for the development of a large interest in history and played a role in the transition from amateurism to professionalism. Their local or regional features did not disappear with the twentieth century; but a new form of society came about: that of craftsmen, usually at national level, at first devoted to history in general and thereafter increasingly focused on specializations. A short text in the first part of the Atlas provides the basic information on this development.
7. European Varieties
Besides the general and impressive European trend towards a very dense and rich landscape of institutions of historiography, the maps invite the reader to discover the diversity of national and regional situations and traditions. The purpose of the following remarks is simply to furnish suggestions for more detailed research and further discoveries.
The maps of 1812, 1830 and 1850 clearly show the advance of history teaching at university level in very different regions, ranging from the British Isles to Russia, from France to the Habsburg Empire. These first institutional networks were still often centred on the capitals: with the obvious exception of the German states, where a more complex geography of smaller residence cities and universities took shape after 1815, the bastions of history for civil servants and diplomats represented by Oxbridge, and some of the Italian states, which did not develop a system of strong universities in the capitals, sometimes for fear of political unrest.
The regional differences are striking when one looks at the same period in the Western Mediterranean countries, especially the Iberian Peninsula but also Italy. In these parts of Europe, historiography’s institutional strongholds were academies or other state institutions more willing to finance scholarly activities like the collection and publication of sources, and to support the professional writing of historiography. Archives and archivists constituted an early pillar of new professional knowledge in these states. Here universities
– mostly unreformed and often badly financed – were weak supports for the making of the new profession in the first half of the nineteenth century. This situation changed after 1870.
Yet another situation is apparent in South-Eastern Europe. Not only were universities scarce or non-existent before the 1880s, but the entire infrastructure for historiography – from archives to associations or museums – was much weaker than in the other parts of Europe. This is unsurprising in the case of areas – for instance Bulgaria – where the national language was still in its infancy or hardly used in higher intellectual fields. Secondary and higher education were little developed, if at all, and students had to go abroad to study. Most of them chose the German-speaking universities of the Habsburg Empire and the German universities – a trend that continued throughout the nineteenth century and the First World War, and even later. The central institutions for historiography were founded by the new states after 1878 (after the Treaty of Berlin when three of the Balkan states obtained formal or de facto independence from the Ottoman Empire) with the explicit purpose of supporting the nation-building process. This applies also to Hungary after the ‘Ausgleich’ of 1867 and the creation of the dual monarchy. In internal affairs, the ruling class in Hungary pursued a policy of enforced nation-building by imposing the use of the Magyar language and repressing the cultural demands of the many minorities on its territory. Only the historical culture of the German minority was fully respected.
The twentieth century entirely changed this regional pattern, replacing it with one exhibiting a marked difference between Eastern and Western Europe. The inter-war period saw institution-building for historiography extend to Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The creation of seven new nation-states, from Finland in the North to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in the South, together with the establishment of the two Soviet republics in Belarus and the Ukraine, was followed by the creation of new national archives, new universities, and new museums, all of them focused on establishing a professional historiography that would serve the new nations and their cultural and political identity.
At all the new or transformed universities, history was taught in the national language, and no longer in German or Russian (or Swedish or Magyar) as it had been before the First World War. Local universities were therefore strengthened, and the institutional arrangements in these new states strongly resembled those of their Western neighbours. Even the architecture of those institutions mirrors the model of the ‘early comers’ in Western and Central Europe. These resemblances appear even more clearly in the general trend to create specific institutes for national history. Many of these new institutions were strongholds of a new brand of nationalistic historiography with strong ties to ethnic as well as racial ideas and expanded the realm of historiography to new methods and disciplines (like demography, ethnology or sociology). The many authoritarian regimes that spread through Europe, particularly its Central, Eastern and Southern parts, liberally supported this trend by financing these new institutions.
Another pattern can be observed in the three European republics of the Soviet Union, where new structures and a new ideological framework for historiography developed. Institutionally, the transfer of research to a set of institutes devoted to historical research in specific fields, often bound up with the world of politics – as is clear in the case of those dealing with the party’s history – and the opening of large central historical institutes at the academies of sciences had the strongest and longest-lasting impact. Intellectually, the search for a new national master narrative in accordance with the new state ideology of Marxism-Leninism inspired a new generation of historians during the 1920s, but it was brutally stopped from above by the terrorenforced imposition of a uniform official view of the history of the three republics and their nations as defined by the Communist Party and Stalin himself in the 1930s.
The export of the Soviet model and its imposition after 1941 and 1945 on Eastern and Central Europe was the greatest change in the institutional and intellectual landscape of European historiography during the twentieth century. During the Stalinist period, the communist rulers simply sought to copy the Soviet model. Thus, formally identical institutional settings spread through the socialist part of Europe: everywhere, a central institute of history as part of a very strong central academy of sciences, together with institutes for the history of the labour movement and the Communist Party, were created, the universities were reformed, and new ones were founded. Generally, history profited from the expansion of higher education as new school teachers were needed and as national historiography now written in a new ‘Marxist’ style remained a central element of the official political culture. The new rulers sought to form a new generation of Marxist historians and to minimize the intellectual and institutional impact of older national ‘bourgeois’ historiography and its representatives. But the realities in each country diverged to a greater or lesser extent from this scheme: in Poland, for example, the lack of historians after the brutal persecution by the Nazis generated a strong connection between the new institutes and the universities because many historians were active in both institutions.
In Western European countries, the institutional landscape of historiography changed under rather different political and cultural conditions. Here the expansion of secondary and higher education was even stronger and lasted longer. This general expansion multiplied the number of universities and positions for professional historians, but it also favoured the creation of a new network of research institutions outside the universities. The institutional links of these institutions with the universities differed from one country to another. In France, a large new research institution, the CNRS, opened parallel careers for professional researchers specialized in one of the many subdisciplines of history; in Italy or Great Britain, research institutions depended on universities for their staff. In most countries, the universities defended their central institutional position in historical scholarship, but a smaller world of highly specialized public or private research institutes came into existence. These profited from the intellectual and political pluralism and responded to the diversified demand for historical research arising from civil society. This new variety of historiography and historical culture was also a factor responsible for the multiplication of museums and archives.
Turning from the macro-level of larger regions and nation-states to that of cities, another European trend becomes apparent: that of the local centres of historiography. Here again, the maps give preliminary information and suggest further directions for study. During the nineteenth century, the capital cities were often the prime centres of local networks of professional institutions for historians. Concentrated in those cities were central archives, wellequipped libraries, academies and the most important universities. This was the case of Paris, Berlin, Munich, Saint Petersburg, Vienna, Brussels, Oslo or Copenhagen; but less so of Madrid, London or Lisbon, where universities came later or were of secondary importance for the historical infrastructure. The capitals of the new nation-states in South-Eastern Europe likewise became the centres of national historiography. From Athens to Belgrade, all important institutions were gathered in the new capital cities, which were often the only places where the new cultural institutions from museums to universities were founded, and which tended to monopolize the country’s intellectual life, as did Belgrade, Athens or Sofia.
But there was another network of centres for historical scholarship: that of the universities. This network of centres superseded that of the capital cities, and in many parts of Western and Southern Europe it was at the origin of a dense regional network of historical institutions. The geography of these universities reached back to the Middle Ages, but it was profoundly changed by new foundations and the reforms which began in the late eighteenth century. Among the pioneers of the new historical knowledge in the first half of the nineteenth century were the universities of Bonn, Heidelberg, Göttingen, Königsberg, and Zürich (all which had more than three chairs).
Later in the century, traditional universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Prague, Bologna or Uppsala started to invest more substantially in history, and successfully established themselves as centres for historical scholarship. In Germany, university cities like Leipzig, Freiburg or Marburg (where an important school for archivists was founded) established themselves as centres of historical scholarship with international reputations. At the turn of the century, this trend towards the creation of broader regional networks of universities with strong profiles in history can equally be observed in Britain (with London and Manchester as the new rivals to Oxbridge), in Belgium (with Ghent or Liège), in Russia (with Moscow competing with Saint Petersburg), in Italy (with competition among Pisa, Bologna and Naples for national ‘leadership’), and in the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire (Czernowitz, Lemberg, Kraków, Prague, Vienna, Innsbruck, and Graz).
The twentieth century saw the expansion of these existing structures: Generally speaking, the capitals profited largely from the creation of central research institutes. Thus, the number of historians (more than 700 of them teaching at universities or doing research in academies and institutes) in Moscow, Paris and Kiev in the 1950s was considerably larger than in any other European city. The national predominance of the capitals is equally apparent in the cases of Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Madrid or Berlin. In the Scandinavian countries, only Sweden is an exception to this pattern: there, a plurality of historical centres was established (Stockholm, Uppsala, Lund, and others).
But the expansion of higher learning had produced quite another general pattern. Centres of historical scholarship were established at many universities. Hence the map of Western and Central Europe shows a myriad of local centres, a kind of ‘fabbrica diffusa’ of historical knowledge where differences in numbers are minor, and where fierce competition among the history departments of universities can be observed. The landscape of professional historiography in Britain, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain or Poland was consequently much more decentralized in 2005 than a century ago. In some countries, university-level studies show the internal links and the networks of careers that existed and still exist between these local centres of historical scholarship. In Germany in around 1900, careers led from smaller universities to the well-established universities of Freiburg, Heidelberg, Bonn, Marburg, Breslau, Leipzig, Munich or Berlin; the last claiming national priority. In France, Lyon, Lille, Nancy, and later Strasbourg, were the best starting points for a career that led to Paris.
Many of the trends that we have indicated do not characterize only the field of historiography alone. Hence, our maps may suggest considerations which extend beyond the discipline of history.
The development of a dual system of university and research institutions, further specialization within individual disciplines, as well as the boom in the supply and demand for higher education in the humanities is not of importance for history alone. In this regard, we suggest that our Atlas can prepare the ground for broader research and constitute the first step towards an atlas of cultural institutions in Europe, which at present does not exist. This would not only be of great importance for cultural historians, or historians of the profession, or of education and research institutions; it would probably also provide important knowledge for policymakers.
‘La carte’, wrote Zacharias and Henri Abraham Chatelain in their Atlas historique published in the eighteenth century, ‘est un secours que l’on fournit à l’imagination’. Maps are not ends in themselves; rather, they should assist in the rethinking of old and more recent problems, and they should advance scholarship.
Our choice was to keep the Atlas as concise as possible. We intended it to be an aid to those wishing to reflect on the history of historiography, and a valuable resource for the teaching of both the history of our discipline and the history of an intellectual profession. We therefore decided to keep the contributions as brief as possible, aiming at clarity and consistency. But on presenting this Atlas to the public we hope that it will be used by other researchers, and serve as the basis for further reflections.
It will be even more useful when we are able to display all the information gathered to prepare the maps on a website. In this way, our rich databases, so enormous that they could never be published in a printed book, will become available to scholars.
Last, but not least, a companion book to this one – Setting the Standards, edited by Ilaria Porciani and Jo Tollebeek and published in the same series – deals with aspects of equal importance but which are less suitable for the quantification of a database. Therefore delegated to this second volume – which assumes the standard format of comparative essays (not infrequently based also on data collected for this Atlas) – will be case studies or market surveys; the trajectories of less known and yet influential independent scholars; the role of different social milieus, of the clergy as well as the notability, of party institutions and academic circles, and to a larger extent the impact of politics; the activities of at least some selected cases of minorities in the production of history; and the individuality of the history professor examined in a number of significant cases of high-ranking European historians.
The reader is invited to work and play with the maps: to trace the networks of historians (of one school, the pupils of one scholar) on the map, and to link the workplaces of famous scholars, the steps in their careers. However, a great deal of research remains to be done before we can pass from such first impressions drawn from individual networks and itineraries to a more concise picture of social and intellectual networks among the many institutions covered by this Atlas. In short: the maps provided in what follows are only a beginning.
