ABSTRACT
Many introductions to cultural history devote at least a section – if not the entirety – of the text to a history of historiography. Thus the main methodological issues emerge from a survey of the forms actually taken, throughout time, by the practice of history writing that has most been inspired by a culturalist agenda. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt was the champion of a model of history of civilization that, in its narrative reconstruction of different epochs and contexts from the past, cannot renounce keeping together art and society, politics and culture. The precise terms and the varying tones and shades of those discussions are predominantly of antiquarian interest today, and go beyond the scope of the present chapter. Cultural history can offer in its own way some response to such doubts, in the form of a historical enquiry on the criteria of truth – a history of truth, as it has been named.
