Abstract This article expands the notion of “regimes of historicity,” developed by historian François Hartog, and interrogates its applicability for the study of French history-writing from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. A regime of historicity is the specific articulation of past, present, and future that members of a certain milieu envision at a certain point in time and that enables them to develop a sense of history based on this temporal framework. This article makes the case for regimes of historicity as a heuristic to study understandings of time, temporality, and history in medieval French historiography, while also inviting closer attention to the material books that transmit history-writing and shape it in significant ways. Asking how manuscripts and early print books produced and implemented regimes of historicity for various audiences enables a granular approach to premodern conceptions of history and offers a complement to the paradigm of “culture historique” that prevails notably in French scholarship on medieval historiography. Regimes of historicity thus serve as a malleable lens through which to approach an ever-changing landscape of history-writing through material artifacts.
Ruhland et al. (Fri,) studied this question.