Tempted though I was to blog this week about Evelyn Lord’s salaciously titled The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies (reviewed here by Jason Kelly) I’ve decide instead to take the moral high ground, and point readers towards a book on theory, that most unwelcome of topics for those historians who consider themselves mere honest grubbers of facts.
Keith Jenkins’ refusal to accept the majority view among practitioners of history that they have satisfactorily answered the questions concerning their methods and premises posed by postmodernism is articulated in a collection of essays written over the last 15 years, At the Limits of History. Essays on Theory and Practice, reviewed here by Martin L. Davies.
Davies claims that ‘What then is at stake in At the Limits of History? Nothing less than history’s validity’. Surely that’s enough to drag a few readers away from the sexual high-jinks of a bunch of Satan-worshipping 18th-century playboys…