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The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory, ed. by Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot, Los Angeles: SAGE, 2013

Table of Contents

The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory introduces the foundations of modern historical theory and the applications of theory to a full range of sub-fields of historical research, bringing the reader as up to date as possible with continuing debates and current developments. The book is divided into three key parts, covering:

- Part I. Foundations: The Theoretical Grounds for Knowledge of the Past

- Part II. Applications: Theory-Intensive Areas in History

- Part III. Coda. Post-Postmodernism: Directions and Interrogations.

This important handbook brings together, in one volume, discussions of modernity, empiricism, deconstruction, narrative and postmodernity in the continuing evolution of the historical discipline into our post-postmodern era. Chapters are written by leading academics from around the world and cover a wide array of specialized areas of the discipline, including social history, intellectual history, gender, memory, psychoanalysis and cultural history. The influence of major thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Hayden White is fully examined.

This handbook is an essential resource for practising historians, and students of history, and will appeal to scholars in related disciplines in the social sciences and humanities who seek a closer understanding of the theoretical foundations of history.

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Anthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic. People and Power in New Rome, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2015

Table of Contents

Although Byzantium is known to history as the Eastern Roman Empire, scholars have long claimed that this Greek Christian theocracy bore little resemblance to Rome. Here, in a revolutionary model of Byzantine politics and society, Anthony Kaldellis reconnects Byzantium to its Roman roots, arguing that from the fifth to the twelfth centuries CE the Eastern Roman Empire was essentially a republic, with power exercised on behalf of the people and sometimes by them too.The Byzantine Republic recovers for the historical record a less autocratic, more populist Byzantium whose Greek-speaking citizens considered themselves as fully Roman as their Latin-speaking “ancestors.” 

Kaldellis shows that the idea of Byzantium as a rigid imperial theocracy is a misleading construct of Western historians since the Enlightenment. With court proclamations often draped in Christian rhetoric, the notion of divine kingship emerged as a way to disguise the inherent vulnerability of each regime. The legitimacy of the emperors was not predicated on an absolute right to the throne but on the popularity of individual emperors, whose grip on power was tenuous despite the stability of the imperial institution itself. Kaldellis examines the overlooked Byzantine concept of the polity, along with the complex relationship of emperors to the law and the ways they bolstered their popular acceptance and avoided challenges. The rebellions that periodically rocked the empire were not aberrations, he shows, but an essential part of the functioning of the republican monarchy.