Historiography of Switzerland

The historiography of Switzerland is the study of the history of Switzerland. Up until the late 20th century, it was largely shaped by the centuries-old traditional account of the founding of the Old Swiss Confederacy through the Federal Charter of 1291 as a defensive alliance of small republics against European tyrants. More recent Swiss scholarship supplements this tradition's emphasis on political and military events with other approaches such as research into Swiss economic history, legal history and social history.

Swiss historiography received substantial public attention in the 1990s, when controversy over Switzerland's conduct during World War II, triggered by a U.S. lawsuit, prompted the Swiss government to commission a much-publicised report by a board of historians.

The earliest works of Swiss history are the battle songs and folk songs in which the earliest Confederates celebrated their deeds, as well as the illustrated chronicles written mostly in the 15th to 17th century on behalf of the authorities of the city-states of Berne and Lucerne. While these chronicles were written from the point of view of the individual states, even the earliest did address issues of all-Swiss significance in some detail.

With the introduction of movable type in Europe, chroniclers could reach a wider audience and begin to write about Swiss history as a whole. The 1507 Chronicle of the Swiss Confederation by Petermann Etterlin exerted great influence on later writers because, as a printed work, it was the first to be generally available. Moreover, Humanist scholars such as Johannes Stumpf and Aegidius Tschudi connected the history of their time with the Roman era of Switzerland and to the accounts of the Helvetii, giving a greater depth to the emerging discipline of history in Switzerland.

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