ABSTRACT
With a mixture of trepidation and excitement, intellectual historians have found themselves drawn more and more steadily into the maelstrom of theoretical disputation that now characterizes the humanities as a whole. If intellectual historians have generally been reluctant to follow literary critics in this direction, it is partly because they have been attentive to a second hermeneutic version of disintegral textualism that has the opposite implication. The consequences for intellectual history were drawn by William Bouwsma, who argued for a shift from 'the history of ideas to the history of meaning'. The data of ethnography make sense only within patterned arrangements and narratives, and these are conventional, political, and meaningful in a more than referential sense. Intellectual historians who follow a textualist approach in this sense need not, therefore, worry about being transformed kicking and screaming into literary critics. If anything, it is the literary critics these days that are in danger of becoming new historicists.
