The historian as a reader: history of historiography and the reading of history

Abstract

This essay has as its starting point a suggestive statement made by Manoel Luiz Guimarães Salgado about the research procedures used in the history of historiography. By suggesting that the attention usually given to historical texts and their conditions of production always presupposes the existence of a “certain kind of reader”, the author brings to the foreground the issue of the reading of history. Based on this assumption that the legitimacy of historiographical discourse lies not only in the historian’s compliance with written protocols, but also in the intellectual performance of readers, this text offers a study of the reflections on historical reading developed by the French historian and antiquarian Claude-François Ménestrier in his work Les divers characters ouvrages des historiques, published in 1694.