Gabrielle mirror

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Gabrielle M. Spiegel (born January 20, 1943 in New York City ) is an American mediaevalist .

Life

Her Jewish family in 1938 for fear of a Europe of Hitler of Antwerp fled to New York. While her father was also Belgian , her mother came from Vienna . The family only wanted to stay temporarily in the USA and later return to Antwerp, so they mainly moved to the Belgian and Viennese emigrant community. For this reason, Spiegel's mother tongue is French. Her mother, however, had a doctorate in English philology from the University of Vienna. Her father spoke eleven different languages. Spiegel and her siblings - older brother, older sister and twin sister - learned English at school, after which their parents spoke German with them. At the end of the Second World War, the family decided not to return.

In 1964 she completed her bachelor's degree in medieval history at Bryn Mawr College with David Herlihy . In the same year she married the journalist Adam Spiegel, with whom she has two children. She completed the MAT at Harvard University the following year, then moved to Baltimore as her husband started working for the Baltimore Sun. 1970 followed the MA at the Johns Hopkins University . During this time she met Robert Forster and Orest Ranum , followers of the Annales School . At the same university she received her Ph. D. Four years later. Her doctoral advisor was John W. Baldwin . The choice of topic for her doctoral thesis, historiography in the time of the Capetians , was relatively unusual in the USA, as more emphasis was placed on empirical research into institutional history at that time. Spiegel gives two reasons for her choice: on the one hand, there was her family situation with two small children, which made it impossible for her to stay in European archives for a longer period, and on the other hand, the increasing concern of the French historians Robert-Henri Bautier and Bernard Guenée Interest in historiography itself. She got to know the latter during her research stays in Paris. The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis - A Survey , published in 1978, was the result of her doctoral thesis . She was employed at the University of Maryland for nineteen years until she was appointed to Johns Hopkins University in 1993 .

In 2008, Spiegel was President of the American Historical Association . She has been an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2011 .

Her daughter is the radio journalist Alix Spiegel .

plant

In addition to French medieval history, Spiegel also deals with postmodern approaches in historiography .

Spiegel regards her experience of linguistic and cultural marginalization as the reason for her career choice. “I am now convinced that it was this perduring sense of not belonging, of intense marginality and linguistic discomfort, of having lost a past and personal history for which I felt that I had been intended but which had been taken away from me by history itself , that generated my need to be a historian [...]. " Her mediaeval interest in her school days was based on reading “The Birth of the West. Fall of Antiquity on the Mediterranean Sea and Rise of the Germanic Middle Ages ”by the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne grown up. They would have been enthusiastic about both the subject of the book and its argumentation, especially the value he placed on long-term developments . Spiegel was also convinced that there were lines of development from the Christian prejudices against Jews of the Middle Ages to those that led to the death of many of their family members and stole their past and thus also their future: “[…] because I intuitively fastened upon the idea that medieval Europe represented in emblematic form the Christian world whose prejudices had led to the death of so many members of my family and deprived me of my history, both past and future. "

Based on her preoccupation with the medieval French chronicles as part of her doctoral thesis, the question arose what real content they have, mainly triggered by the description of miracles , resurrections etc. So that she dealt with the work of Hayden White , in particular with his book Metahistory (1973), as well as with the writings of the poststructuralists . Nancy Partner , Robert Hanning and Robert Stein , colleague Spiegel, did the same. In her opinion, this also reflected her own biography, which is connected with the need for knowledge about the past and the simultaneous impossibility of safely gaining it, since that was irretrievably lost. Later she was very interested in the connection between memory and history.

Her best-known articles include The Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages , published in 1990 in the historical magazine Speculum . In it she tries to make the approaches of the linguistic turn fruitful for the history of the Middle Ages. Together with other historians such as Nancy Partner, also a medievalist, as well as Davis and Lynn Hunt, she is looking for a moderate position that takes into account the postmodern approaches to historiography, but not the paradigms of their own training, i.e. any empiricism and consideration of the socio-economic Background, gives up. She gives the text a social logic . Language fulfills two functions: the first is that it is a static image of the context in which the text is created, the second function that it also actively creates this context. These considerations can also be found in her book Romancing the Past, published in 1993 . The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth Century France .

Fonts (selection)

  • The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis - A Survey , Brookline 1978.
  • Romancing the Past - The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France , Berkeley 1993. ISBN 9780520089358 .
  • The Past As Text - The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography , Baltimore 1997. ISBN 0-8018-6259-0 .
  • Memory and History - Liturgical Time and Historical Time , in: History and Theory, 41 (2002), pp. 149-162.
  • Practicing History - New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn , New York et al. 2005. ISBN 0415341078 .
  • Revision in History , Malden, Mass. 2007. [= History and Theory; Vol. 46, No. 4: Theme Issue; 46]

literature

  • Gabrielle M. Spiegel: France for Belgium , in: Laura Lee Downs, Stéphane Gerson (Eds.), Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination , Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London 2007, pp. 89-98.
  • Jaume Aurell, Performative Academic Careers: Gabrielle Spiegel and Natalie Davis , in: Rethinking History , Vol. 13, No. 1, March 2009, pp. 53-64

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Maria Blackburn, The Speech , Arts and Sciences Magazin Online, Fall 2008 Vol. 6, No.1
  2. ↑ Gabrielle M. Spiegel: France for Belgium , in: Laura Lee Downs, Stéphane Gerson (eds.), Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination , Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London 2007, pp. 89-98, p. 92.
  3. ↑ Gabrielle M. Spiegel: France for Belgium , in: Laura Lee Downs, Stéphane Gerson (eds.), Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination , Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London 2007, pp. 89-98, p. 93.
  4. ↑ Spiegel's résumé on the Johns Hopkins University website , p. 11.
  5. ↑ Gabrielle M. Spiegel: France for Belgium , in: Laura Lee Downs, Stéphane Gerson (eds.), Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination , Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London 2007, pp. 89-98, p. 90.
  6. ^ A b Gabrielle M. Spiegel: France for Belgium , in: Laura Lee Downs, Stéphane Gerson (eds.), Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination , Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London 2007, pp. 89-98, p. 91.
  7. ↑ Jaume Aurell, Performative Academic Careers: Gabrielle Spiegel and Natalie Davis , in: Rethinking History, Vol. 13, No. 1, March 2009, pp. 53-64, p. 56.
  8. ↑ Gabrielle M. Spiegel: France for Belgium , in: Laura Lee Downs, Stéphane Gerson (eds.), Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination , Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London 2007, pp. 89-98, p. 96.
  9. ↑ Gabrielle M. Spiegel: France for Belgium , in: Laura Lee Downs, Stéphane Gerson (eds.), Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination , Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London 2007, pp. 89-98, p. 97.
  10. ↑ Jaume Aurell, Performative Academic Careers: Gabrielle Spiegel and Natalie Davis , in: Rethinking History, Vol. 13, No. 1, March 2009, pp. 53-64, p. 54.
  11. ↑ Jaume Aurell, Performative Academic Careers: Gabrielle Spiegel and Natalie Davis , in: Rethinking History, Vol. 13, No. 1, March 2009, pp. 53-64, p. 58.
  12. ↑ Jaume Aurell, Performative Academic Careers: Gabrielle Spiegel and Natalie Davis , in: Rethinking History, Vol. 13, No. 1, March 2009, pp. 53-64, p. 57.
personal data
SURNAME Mirror, Gabrielle
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spiegel, Gabrielle Michele (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American medievalist
DATE OF BIRTH January 20, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City