La historia viviente: historia más verdadera

The relationship between the Italian thinking of sexual difference and some Spanish women historians has radically modified a part of historiography in the Castilian and Catalan languages of the last twenty years. The most important modification is has been posed by the idea and the figure of “living history”. The idea of “living history” belongs to Marirì Martinengo, and with her are working those women that make up the Comunità di storia vivente (Community of Living History) of the Milan Women’s Bookstore. It is born of a quite common form of women’s knowledge that consists of recognising and caring for the link between experience and word, between experience and writing, knowing that experience, word and writing are not the same. It causes, or can cause, in the woman historian a stirring of the soul which leads her to an awareness of the fact that her vocation for history has an intimate link with the sources of her personal experience, with her core. It is the sources of her experience which need to be interpreted and spoken by her, in the first place, when she writes history. It needs to be said by her in a faithful and perfectly erudite dialogue with the sources of the past, those sources that, not by chance, she has chosen to work with. The idea and the figure of “living history” bring to today’s historiography a radical change in symbolic horizon and in method.