Scholars have long recognized that the period we now label early modern offers many rich meditations on the nature of historical thought and writing. In doing so, they have elucidated the historical character of genres or disciplines whose outputs were not narrative histories in the conventional sense. From legal commentaries and geographic surveys to antiquarian catalogs and editions of ancient texts, early moderns often did history without necessarily writing histories. Yet perhaps less recognized is the fact that many of their categories and concerns live on in contemporary historiographical debate. For instance, the question of the “grand narrative”—often used in a pejorative sense—has continued to be a persistent problem: in twenty-first-century parlance, we “complicate,” “pick apart” or “trouble” such overly ambitious designs. Yet at the same time, others call for a return of the longue durée; the pendulum continues to swing between fine-grained contextualism and a broad sweep.

This roundtable will examine episodes in the early modern chapter of this perennial debate. And it will do so in a fashion both connective and comparative. We will explore how early modern historians in Europe, in the Americas, and in Asia grappled with the classic question of the relationship between historical narrative and past events themselves. How did early modern historians reflect on these issues of narrative framing in their own works? And how if at all did such thinking shape their writings, whether they called them histories or something else? Participants will present recent research on the global history of historiography to examine how scholars in the past grappled with the classic “chicken and egg” problem: does narrative determine the facts, events, particulars we select, or do these particulars determine narratives? We will also investigate how various forms of periodization and conceptions of time made new forms of history possible (or impossible) to write. We will highlight the need for a global, comparative study of narrative-building and to show how accounts from Europe, the Americas, Asia, and elsewhere both interacted and influenced each other. Finally this session will interrogate the ways in which insights into early modern historiography can reshape our approaches to narrative conventions in the twenty-first century, be those in academic monographs, journal articles, or writings for popular audiences.