ABSTRACT
In his polemic Refiguring History, Keith Jenkins portrays professional historians as labouring under illusions and clinging to self-definitions which are foolish and predicated upon falsehoods. He argues that historians access the past by deploying a particular set of ‘discursive skills’ yet that they are as expert in the studying of ‘the before now’ as ‘anyone’: ‘journalists, politicians, media commentators, film makers, artists – can and do successfully access “the before now” often in ingenious ways which pay scant regard for the “skills and methods” of the historian’.2
