6 - Reflections

Summary

Retrospect

The academic battlefields of geography and history are littered with aphorisms about each other, as well as about their ‘mysterious’ offspring, historical geography. One of the earliest and best known comes from Peter Heylyn's Microcosmus, or a Little Description of the Great World: ‘Geographie without Historie has life and motion but at randome, and unstable; Historie without Geographie like a dead carcasse has neither life nor motion at all’ (Heylyn 1621: 11). Such aphorisms provide flashes of insight rather than a sustained illumination of the relations of geography and history. I have not sought to add to that inventory of aphorisms. My objective has been to examine critically the relations of geography and history generally and the practices of historical geography and geographical history specifically. At a time when the social sciences and humanities are moving increasingly towards both historical and geographical modes of explanation and understanding, when there is discernible both a ‘historical turn’ and a ‘geographical turn’ in those realms, there is both a need and an opportunity to contribute to the long-standing discourse between history and geography. I have done so here through a critique of the intellectual status of historical geography, their principal ‘hybrid’ – a descriptive term which portrays the product of the union of history and geography more positively (and certainly more politely) than does ‘bastard Science’, which is how historical geography was once described (Auerbach 1903: 897). ‘Hybridity’ in this context implies intellectual diversity and strength.