Multiform Arguments in the Historiography of Individualism in Pre-Modern Europe

This dissertation argues that we can have a better, more effective illustrated historiography; that we can construct and communicate historical arguments that combine words and images, considering clear nomenclature, conventions and standards; and that we can develop an analytical and critical discourse about verbal-visual or multiform arguments and knowledge. We can do so because this dissertation offers a new analytical approach to historiography that combines words and images. This approach conceptualizes illustrated historiography and arguments as multiform, to emphasize their hybrid nature, and enhance the awareness of the various forms this hybridity takes. My investigation of this hybridity provides terminology to describe nuances of textual multiformity; analytical methods to explore the structure and function of multiform arguments (MFAs); and, finally, directions for future empirical research that will help scholars construct MFAs more effectively, and deepen our understanding of multiform grammar. This dissertation analyzes five MFAs from five different publications that explore pre-modern individualism in Europe (ca. 1050-1600). Their debate is on where and when individualism developed; what its catalysts, and cultural and social features were; and how to define individual. These illustrated publications range from 1958 to 2015. While the first publication was illustrated after the historians death, the other four were illustrated by the historians themselves. Therefore, the analysis of those five MFAs shows how historians and illustrators create historical notions, using primary sources of both verbal and visual sorts, and how they communicate those notions by juxtaposing words and images in printed books. Analyzing MFAs from a discourse that historicizes the self, and that addresses the methodological and epistemological problematic of the historians self doing so, promotes self-awareness, and analogy between selves and MFAs. Drawing on studies from historiography, linguistics, art history, literary criticism, psychology and computer science, this dissertation concludes that the rhetorical devices that serve historians in depicting the past through MFAs are the same devices that have enabled institutions and individuals to construct identities for individuals. Thus, awareness of multiformity in the past and its representation increases the effectiveness of using MFAs, as it illuminates the ideologies and playfulness that prevail between words and images.