If everything has a history, some subjects are more fugitive than others. Each of the papers in this session explores what we might call “impossible histories,” accounts of the past whose questions or methods press the capacities of the discipline to the breaking-point: conjectural histories of events that left no documentary trace, prehistories of astrological science that interwove Scripture with myth and threatened to spill over into prophecy, anecdotes of the extremities to which starvation drives men and women. Each of these traditions demanded ingenuity and industry; each forced historians, both their early modern exponents and their contemporary scholars, to reimagine their craft.

The early modern period, a moment of innovation in so many realms of human endeavor and knowledge-making, was transformative for the craft of history. This panel acknowledges the bold, even unnerving creativity of early modern scholars of the past, vindicating the intellectual seriousness of even their wilder leaps and illuminating the radically different conditions of possibility in which they worked. It also recovers the profound importance of history in the early modern world, from its dangerous theological stakes to the communal memories of catastrophe that were the poor’s best defense against an uncertain future. Drawing together textual traditions spanning millennia and the methods of individual scholars, ranging from ballads to horoscopes, these papers reveals the startling diversity of historical thought and practice in the early modern period.

In recovering these impossible histories, each of the papers also recovers the historiographical traditions they generated: the forgotten Renaissance forebears of the eighteenth-century conjectural historians, for example, or the early modern readers of late medieval histories of astrology. The panel is accordingly an opportunity for reflection on the historical tradition as we have inherited it and on the branches we have neglected, opening the way to a more capacious sense of what historicism looks like.

For the early modern historian and the historian in the early modern period share many of the same problems: how to make do with fewer sources than one would like, how to relate the past to the present and perhaps even to the future, how to navigate the politics of the stories we tell, how to distinguish legend from fact, where narration ends and fabulation begins. These impossible histories, with all the imagination and industry they inspired from their historians, capture the labor of the scholar in the highest conceivable relief.