Theorizing and Practising ‘Scientific’ History in South-Eastern Europe (Nineteenth–Twentieth Century): Spyridon Lambros and Nicolae Jorga

The emergence and crystallization of scientific order in historical writing is primarily related to profound changes to attitudes to knowledge in the course of the eighteenth century. The turn towards experiential knowledge contributed to the increase of interest in specific rules of method and research for history. Scientificity arose as a central goal for history at the turn of the eighteenth century. It became primarily associated with empirically grounded, critical research within the context of the professionalization and institutionalization of historical studies in the course of the nineteenth century. 1 The contribution of both professionalization and institutionalization of history to processes of naturalization of the nation in a variety of European contexts is probably one of the most important phenomena related to these developments. Hence, this process which involves the search for scientificity is not of a universal and uniform nature. On the contrary, each contextualization implies different strategies of relocation and reappropriation as well as different interpretative formulae which turn it into a form of ‘situated knowledge’ within indigenous traditions. 2 The Greek and Romanian cases provide important space for a study of the diffusion of scientificity and its relation to the naturalization of the nation in historical writing throughout the nineteenth as well as the first part of the twentieth century. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.