Tomazov Valerii

Prosopography: Disciplinary status and research opportunities

Section: Theory and methodology of modern biography

Abstract: This article is devoted to prosopography, one of the special historical disciplines that have been constantly in the focus of considerable attention by Ukrainian historians during some recent decades. The purpose of research is tohighlight the significant theoretical issues: the disciplinary status of prosopography, its goals, research strategies and methodological approaches, as well as the source base. In our research, we applied both general and special-historical research methods – historical-genetic, typological, analytical, system-structural, aswell as the method of interpretive synthesis. Besides, the methods and proceduresof archival, source and bibliographic heuristics, classification and verification of sources were used. The scientific novelty is to try to justify the disciplinary status of prosopography, to determine its objectives and goals, to offer a classification of sources and research methods. We studied the history about formation of the discipline and modern tendencies of its development, the contribution of national historians into formation of its theoretical foundations, as well as the sources to create a prosopographic portrait. Conclusions. Prosopography as a special historical discipline in Ukrainian historical science is still at the stage of formation, clarification of its theoretical and methodological principles. Despite the factthat some historians consider prosopography as a method or direction of scientific research, it is a special historical discipline, as it can solve the importantand urgent problems of history. The peculiarity of prosopographic sources is their extraordinary diversity, scattering and huge amount – this is almost all theevidence that contains the information about human. Therefore, it is a difficultscientific problem to create their generalized classification. Further developmentand refinement requires the methodological approaches and research strategiesof prosopographic studies.

Keywords: prosopography, special historical discipline, prosopographic group, collective portrait, biography, sources, research methods.

  Full-text PDF    https://doi.org/10.15407/ub.22.055     Citation

• Tomazov Valerii (History of Ukraine of the NAS of Ukraine, Ukraine, Kyiv, [email protected]) ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4052-9438

Cite:
Tomazov Valerii (2021). Prosopography: Disciplinary status and research opportunities. Biographistica Ukrainica, (22) 55-71. (In Ukrainan). https://doi.org/10.15407/ub.22.055

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