ABSTRACT
When reading book titles such as those of F. Braudel 's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the time of Philip the Second, E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class or L. Kelly's Women in the French Revolution, no one would doubt their being books about history, its distinct aspects, different periods, its being viewed from differing standpoints, but, for all that, partaking of common characteristics that would allow us to say that they all had their part in the same discipline. The information, conjectures, interpretations, declarations and explanations that history books contain are grounded upon data sifted from diverse original sources; upon the arguments pieced together by other writers once these have been properly compared and contrasted; and upon a thorough use of archives where, in Thompson's words (cited by Fontana, 1992, p. 115), 'ambivalent and enigmatic evidence is to be found'. However, during this searching out of evidence, differences of opinion between historians might well be encountered, these being brought about by contrasts in theoretical a priori ideas which have been used to steer research, by the very questions for which they are trying to find an answer or by such positions as they might wish to defend or, at times, be born of nothing better than a gathering together of information to serve as the ground work and argument for tales planned - and not always innocently - for a public held to be too unlettered to understand anything better.
