ABSTRACT
For disciplinary practitioners dedicated above all else to the ‘(s)till … dominant idea of practice among modern, professional, Western historians’,4 which is to say, to the maintenance of ‘the standards of Rankean methodological objectivity in their works’,5 the diverse and often wearying intellectual challenges of recent decades – ranging from the epistemological questions raised by the ‘linguistic turn’ to the evidential problems presented by the burgeoning use of non-documentary sources such as the visual image or the spoken word – have been hard to escape.6 In the face of such provocations, the assessment of a leading ‘traditional’ historian such as Gertrude Himmelfarb is that ‘postmodernism reverses two centuries of scholarship designed to make history a “discipline” – a rigorous, critical, systematic study of the past, complete with a methodology designed to make that study as objective as possible’.7
