ABSTRACT
Never before has there been such a vast array of methods available with which to study the past, such a range of subject-matter and variety of audiences, and all to be understood within the broad sense of irony that seemingly encompasses Western culture today.1 Never before have so many historians also accepted that written history deploys a system of language that is a part of the reality being described – a representation that is itself a complex cultural as well as a linguistic product. Living as we do in an age conceived and understood predominantly in terms of an ironic consciousness, and heavily influenced by the profusion and confusion of structuralist, post-structuralist, symbolic and anthropological models of the relationship between explanation and theory, even the strongest supporters of the traditional empiricist paradigm occasionally ask how can the reality of the past be known to us – or more precisely, how accurate can be its representation as a narrative? The debate on the relationship between postmodernity and history centres on the connection between the empirical and other methods of understanding as used by historians.2
