New Historicist Context and Contingency

Core Idea

New Historicism insists that literary texts are products of specific historical moments shaped by contingent forces—not universal human nature or timeless truths. Meanings depend on archival, cultural, and material contexts that made them possible. Literature both reflects and shapes its historical moment; understanding requires dense attention to what was knowable, sayable, and possible.

Explainer

From New Historicism you know that literary texts exist in, not above, history — that a play by Shakespeare is not a window onto eternal human nature but a document of Elizabethan England's specific anxieties, power structures, and modes of making meaning. Context and contingency are the twin concepts that specify what New Historicism means by historical embeddedness. Context is not background information mentioned in an introduction; it is the dense network of material, cultural, and discursive conditions that made particular thoughts expressable and made certain meanings available while foreclosing others. Contingency is the philosophical stance: these conditions were not necessary or inevitable. They were the product of accidents, power struggles, and particular configurations of interest that could have been otherwise.

The practical consequence is that meanings are radically local. A term like "nature," "liberty," or "subject" does not have a stable transhistorical meaning that a text taps into — it has a historically specific range of meanings, associations, and contradictions that were available at the moment of writing. New Historicist close reading therefore requires what Stephen Greenblatt calls thick description (borrowing Clifford Geertz's anthropological concept): not the recovery of what a text "really means" beneath its surface, but the reconstruction of the web of social and discursive practices within which the text was produced and within which its meanings were intelligible. This means reading archival documents — legal records, sermons, conduct manuals, medical texts, court entertainments — alongside literary works, not as background but as co-participants in the same cultural circulation of meaning.

Contingency does work beyond establishing that things could have been different. It is a critical defamiliarization of the present. If the categories through which a particular historical moment organized experience were contingent — if the Elizabethan understanding of the body as a system of humoral flows was specific to that moment rather than a failed approximation of medical truth — then our own categories are equally contingent, equally historical. New Historicism reads the past not to find timeless truths reflected there, but to estrange the present: to make our own assumptions visible by showing that seemingly self-evident categories have histories. When Greenblatt recovers the specific Elizabethan discourse on the theatricality of royal power to read Shakespeare's history plays, he is also — implicitly — making the reader's assumptions about power, performance, and legitimacy strange.

The tension this creates is productive: New Historicism must use present-day categories to recover past ones, and it must make arguments that are legible to present-day readers while insisting on the radical difference of past contexts. Specificity is the discipline that mediates this tension. The New Historicist argument does not claim universal applicability; it claims precision — this text, in this moment, within this particular intersection of discursive formations and material conditions. The strength of the reading is measured by the density and specificity of the archival reconstruction, not by the breadth of the generalizations it supports. This is why New Historicist essays often begin with an anecdote — a specific historical incident, usually drawn from a non-literary archive — that opens onto the cultural logic the essay will trace through a literary text. The anecdote is not mere illustration; it is the historical particular that anchors the reading's claim to contextual precision.