THE HISTORIANS BOOK 39. The Rise & Fall Of Gestures Drama

Conceived and written by Peter Greenaway, “The Historians” a project imagined for 100 books to be published over ten years, a sort of encyclopaedic summary previously to create and examine in exhausting detail the 100 year history of a great continent.
It may be that items and events that have already occurred in the history of the world in the last five thousand years might be perceived and recognised, though seemingly distorted, retold, re-imagined, viewed through a mirror or a mist, indeed entirely reset with different outcomes; and it might be that among the historians themselves, we might recognise a fictionalised Carlo Ginzburg, a Macaulay, a Carlyle, and a Gibbon or a Raleigh, if not perhaps a Tacitus or a Livy.
Book 39: The Rise & Fall of Gestures Drama evokes the history of the silent language that is the gesture in the theatre, the pretext to the creation of a narrative that calls for the imaginative participation of the reader while playing on the mute representation of the language that is the text in the process of reading.
Others will see the critical and political dimension of the work of Greenaway where History fragments mix that question the borders between history and fiction according to the idea that “there is no such thing as history, there are only historians”.