Summary
Title: The New Historicism
Author: Gina Hens-Piazza
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Press
ISBN: 0800629892
Pro:
• Easy to read and understand
• Quite a lot of information in a slim volume
Con:
• None
Description:
• Explains background and methodology of New Historicism
• Argues that New Historicism should continue to play an important role
• Provides illustrations of how this approach works
Book Review
Gina Hens-Piazza, an Associate Professor of Old Testament Studies at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, explores the premises and fruits of New Historicism in a manner very accessible to non-specialists and non-scholars. As she explains, New Historicism is more a sensibility or perspective on texts than a methodology or theory. She identifies four basic assumptions which constitute the core of New Historicism:
- 1. Literature is viewed as integrally tied to and identified with other material realities that make up a social contract.
2. Viewing literature as on par with other types of texts, the privileging of literature or its composition over and above other social practices is rejected.
3. Characteristic distinctions between literature and history are sidelined.
4. The constructions of the past are presumed as intimately tied to the present.
All of this is derived from post-modernist ideas about how to approach history and literature - but what does it mean for biblical scholarship? What is "new" about New Historicism? Well, unlike traditional historicist approaches, New Historicism rejects the possibility of developing any sort of scientifically quantifiable understanding of history.
Instead, all history is a human construction which reflects the perspectives and prejudices of the society in which it was written. There is no truly "objective" history; rather, there exists a multiplicity of historical accounts, all of which have something to tell us.
On one level, this means that historical accounts in the Bible must be approached in two ways - first as a record of what happened in the past and second as a record of the concerns and perspectives of the time in which that account was written. But, more than that, New Historicism argues that the same is true about *current attempts to explain biblical history. Scholars working today must be viewed in the same manner as those of the original original texts - both as exploring the past and as reflecting the present.
This complicates matters tremendously. New Historicism makes it much more difficult to approach any contemporary piece of scholarship as if it were objective and free from bias. It also forces scholars to think more about how their biases are influencing their work and take more responsibility for the consequences which their work might have:
- "Increasingly, critics working on biblical texts have begun to recognize and claim the political import of what they do when they interpret texts. They understand that there are social consequences tied to the outcome of their work. Hence, a commitment to work in biblical studies increasingly enjoins a commitment to social change on the part of those who would participate in that practice. Given the recognized influence of the Bible on culture in the past and in the present, a cadre of critics ...determined to be equally influential on the future by virtue of what they do with these texts in the present is not a bad prospect for the next era in biblical studies."
Hens-Piazza's target audience is necessarily narrow - not everyone is all that interested in methods of biblical interpretation. Nevertheless, it is written in a way which should be accessible to most readers and is recommendable to anyone looking to learn more about this particular perspective on biblical scholarship.
