ABSTRACT
The “history of Historiography” is a classical subject whose importance most historians recognize, but whatever consensus exists among them, although the expression-euphonic and complex at the same time-hardly facilitates change. Its growing prestige materialized in 1980 with the creation of a Commission of History of Historiography within the International Congress of Historical Sciences (CISH) which met in the Romanian capital where the well-known journal Storia della Storiografia is published and several international conferences about Historiography have been convened. This acknowledgement, which goes back to the early decades of this century, has its origin in the objective proclaimed by its scholars, namely, studying the discipline of historical writing and historians themselves. This may seem obvious now but was far from being well established given that the old term historiographyhas long been known for its semantic imprecision. Remember that the expression history of Historiography owes its meaning to two interpretations of the term historiography in circulation during the nineteenth century: (1) the
German Geschichtsschreibung, which could be rendered as “historical writing,” and (2) the French sense of historiographie as “literary history of history books,” as seen in the 1887 supplement of Émile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française.1
