ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the nature of the models and their application to historical situations. Historical models, however diverse, share two main characteristics: they are time-bound and they are comparative. The first is peculiar to history; the second to all the human studies which have man, other than as a biological organism, for their subject. Historians as a profession are not given to constructing or employing models in any formal or explicit sense; where they do, it is mainly in areas bordering on other disciplines, especially economics and social studies. The historian's models are thus principally directed to the assimilation of the new: a Reformation, the Huguenots, the reign of Louis XIV, Louis as a young king in 1650 and an old king in 1690. He has to show how one situation or group or individual, regarded initially as worthy of study, was succeeded by another.
