Griffiths, Sam; (2021) Contingency and artifice. In: Writing the Materialities of the Past. Cities and the Architectural Topography of Historical Imagination. (pp. 27-48). Routledge: London, UK.

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Abstract

This chapter explores the qualities of contingency and artifice in architectural topographic descriptions in the narratives of contrasting events from different epochs of English and French history. The historiographical survey reveals how widely different levels of investment in architectural topographic description are associated with different approaches to historical writing. These approaches do not simply reflect stylistic choices but different ideas about the nature of historical knowledge. The historian’s imaginative response to the problem of representing the specificity of when-where events as a coherent narrative succession is architectural topographically encoded, allowing scope for the play of divergent possibilities and unknowns in the light of sparse and ambiguous source material. The artefactual domain does not give unlimited scope to contingency in the sense that ‘anything’s possible’ but expresses the time-space figurational constraints of a specific historical reality in terms of its contingent possibilities for movement, bodily co-presence and encounter.

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