Introduction

Abstract

This is a book by historians about history, personal reflections on an ancient but ever varying discipline. In writing about their task, which is to reconstruct a past that they have never known, and that they can neither deduce from first principles nor create by an act of the imagination, they reveal their diverse presuppositions, concerns, and ambitions. And they also reveal that their work is difficult yet pleasurable, constantly changing yet in some respects uniform, sometimes drudgery and sometimes inspiration. It is, in short, a human task, akin in its pleasures and conflicts to all other human activity.

“An orthodox history seems to me a contradiction in terms.”—

F. W. Maitland