On Creative Historiography
There has been seemingly increased discussions of what unites the humanities and the sciences. One area that seems to unite different branches of knowledge is creativity , as well as a sense of wonder. In a more limited scope, the ancient historian Robin Lane Fox reflects on the limits and potentials of creativity in historiography versus fiction. In his Travelling Heroes , he begins with what looks like the basic assumptions of those writing fiction versus those writing history: Novelists, surely, need to imagine, whereas earthbound historians have only to collect as mundane information as survives. (p. 4) Yet he begins to break down this dichotomy of data gathering versus creative imagination, showing the constraints in fiction and the role of the imagination in history-writing: Yet novelists become constrained by their own creations and by the need for them to be coherent as they develop. Historians must amass and collect but they then have freedoms...