The Documents of Feith

In his grand overview of the history of the humanities, De vergeten wetenschappen (‘The Forgotten Sciences’), Rens Bod takes as his theme the continuous search for empirical patterns and methodical principles. ¹ The book shows a wide array of remarkable similarities and cross-sections between the humanities. Nineteenth-century historiography, for example: its stress on the critical use of primary sources owed a lot to philology and it shared its search for quite rigid methodology with linguistics and, again, philology. ² Less prominent in Bod’s book but perhaps most strikingly similar between the humanities was – quite paradoxically – their stress on mutual differences. The humanities established themselves as (academic) disciplines by demarcating themselves from predecessors, amateurs and neighbouring disciplines. These demarcations should be an object of investigation themselves; although method played an important role in their fixation, they cannot be explained by it alone.