The Episteme of the Gallic Past

This book aims to reconceive the field of knowledge of the Gallic past in French discourse of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by focusing on the monument as an object capable of underpinning insights into that past, the evolution of the concept, and the epistemic practices used to produce it. Through monuments, the book redirects our gaze toward the French provinces, where material and immaterial evidence of the Gallic past was discovered and transformed into epistemic objects. This perspective results in a provincialization of Paris as a site of knowledge production and sheds light on the crucial role of provincial scholarship, not only in the invention of the Gallic past but also in methodological and epistemological renewal. The result is a revision of recent historiography, which interpreted the narrative of an autochthonous pre-Roman, Gallic past as nation-building. This volume offers a pioneering contribution toward new directions in historical epistemology focused on the historicity of the species of evidence of each epoch.