Dynastic historical writing

This chapter studies dynastic historical writing and how diverse notions of family, with the full richness of meaning that concept bears, come to impose themselves upon, and are expressed by, written accounts of the past. The importance of the underlying issue is self-evident, because the intersection of family and history writing touches on two fundamental means by which all people situate themselves in their world: through kinship and in relation to the past. Combining family loyalties with past sensitivities, dynastic historical writing represents the creation of a special, and specially revealing, form of knowledge, caught between the socially embedded and the detached. Examining the ways in which kinship and the past are combined in different times and places also has the potential to bring out differences and similarities in important fields of human experience.