Page - 27 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

27Introduction structural analysis hallmarked by the Annales. “Inside every historian there lies a biographer struggling to come out,” a distinguished historical biographer wrote during this period, acknowledging that “the biographer […] has become a deplorable example any historian should avoid.”80 Biography was dismissed as the rearguard-fight of (German) historicism, based on a dogmatic principle of individuality, risking heroization and mythicization, and as an obstacle to a theory-oriented historical science.81 The subsequent, poststructuralist empha- sis on language and cultural encoding led not only to new ways of thinking about (literally and metaphorically) texts, writing, and reading and the “death of the author”82 as the creator and the owner of meaning but generally to the reduction of scope for individual agency from yet another angle. As a matter of fact, these tendencies in later twentieth-century historical scholarship were indifferent, rather than outright hostile, to biography, and they did contain elements that were instrumental in its recent recovery. Such was the interest of some of the Annalistes in the psychological and emotional components of the collective mentalities of past societies,83 or the acknowl- edgment that languages as paradigms, and cultures as systems are far from be- ing fixed and rigid: while imposing certain constraints on members of the communities whose expressive performances they contextualize, they are suf- ficiently flexible to offer opportunities of creative adaptation and even bound- ary-testing.84 In addition, partly as a response to the inadequacy of large- scale structural analysis to deal with “the negotiations, circulations, and 80 A.J.P. [Alan John Percivale] Taylor, “The Historian as Biographer,” in Biographie und Ge- schichtswissenschaft: Aufsätze zur Theorie und Praxis biographischer Arbeit, ed. Grete Klin- genstein, Heinrich Lutz, and Gerald Stourzh (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1979), 254–61, here 254–55. 81 The low appreciation of biography among historians has been detectable ever since the nineteenth-century ambition of framing their discipline on the model of the natural sci- ences, with seriality and “laws” superseding the individual and the contingent. Sabina Loriga, “La biographie comme problème,” in Revel, Jeux d’échelles, 209–31; Loriga, “Bio- graphical and Historical Writing in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” Transitions to Modernity Colloquium, the MacMillan Center, Yale University, February 18, 2008. 82 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Barthes, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–48. 83 This is a trait as old as Lucien Febvre’s (1878–1956) Un destin: Martin Luther (first pub- lished 1928, Paris: puf, 1968) and his Le problème de l’incroyance au 16e siècle: La religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1947). 84 See concise statements by the classics of “linguistic contextualism.” J.G.A. Pocock, “Intro- duction: The State of the Art,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 11–34, here 4–15. Quentin Skinner, “General Preface,” in Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vi–viii, here vii.