The writing of history / Michel de Certeau ; translated by Tom Conley.

Translation of: L'écriture de l'histoire.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

pt. 1. Productions of places. Making history : problems of method and problems of meaning -- The historiographical operation -- part 2. Productions of time : a religious achaeology. Introduction : questions f method -- The inversion of what can be thought : religious history in the seventeenth century -- The formality of practices : from religious systems to the ethics of the enlightenment (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) -- part 3. Systems of meaning : speech and writing. Ethnography : speechor the space of the other : Jean de Léry -- Language altered : the sorcer's speech -- A variant : hagio-graphical edification -- part 4. Freudian writing. What Freud makes of history : "a seventeenth-century demonological neurosis" -- The fiction of history : the wrting of Moses and monotheism.

A leading intellectual member of France's Freudian school, Michel de Certeau combined principles from the disciplines of religion, history, and psychoanalysis in order to redefine historiography and rethink the categories of history. In The Writing of History, de Certeau examines the West's changing conceptions of the very role and nature of history itself, from the seventeenth-century attempts to formulate a "history of man" to Freud's Moses and Monotheism with which de Certeau interprets historical practice as a function of mankind's feelings of loss, mourning, and absence. Exhaustively researched and stunningly innovative, The Writing of History is a crucial introduction to de Certeau's work and is destined to become a classic of modern thought.

Translation of: L'écriture de l'histoire.