The Episteme of the Gallic Past: French Historical Research in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

Through monuments, the book redirects our gaze toward the French provinces, where material and immaterial evidence of the Gallic past was “discovered” and transformed into epistemic objects. This perspective results in a “provincialization” of Paris as a site of knowledge production and sheds light on the crucial role of provincial scholarship, not only in the “invention” of the Gallic past but also in methodological and epistemological renewal. The result is a revision of recent historiography, which interpreted the narrative of an “autochthonous” pre-Roman, Gallic past as nation-building.

This volume offers a pioneering contribution toward new directions in historical epistemology focused on the historicity of the “species” of evidence of each epoch.