ABSTRACT
The chapter introduces the concept of history’s bodies and authorities, drawing on Natalie Zemon Davis’ idea of rulers having both physical and political bodies. It discusses the tension between these bodies and the body of historical research in prize-winning histories of women, gender, and sexuality. It detects these tensions at play in the limited range of modes of truth expression or modals used by human historians. The modal logic of human historians appears to be constrained. Conversely, while modal logic may be used in the design of algorithms, they are not signalled to users in artificial histories. Rather, artificial histories use more certain modes of expression and first-person address to support user trust.
