LOCATING HISTORY IN THE HUMANITIES

Abstract

This article addresses the question of the place of History within the broader scholarly domain of the Humanities. It was prompted by the need to continue seeking for more clarity on what History as a domain of scholarly inquiry has in common with the rest of the humanistic disciplines and how that relationship may have changed over the many centuries of the existence the Humanities. The broader context for the discussion in the article is the continued effort by scholars such as Rens Bod, to articulate the general principles and laws that govern scholarship in the humanities. Due to the vastness of the subject matter, the article is essentially sketchy and often schematic. It handles the Humanities in its generality rather than giving an exposition of how History relates to each of the known Humanities disciplines individually, as the latter task is addressed at least partly by other contributions that are being published along with this article. The article takes a diachronic approach, starting with a brief section on the concept of the Humanities in time, and spending more space in discussing the changing relationship between History on one hand and the rest of the humanistic disciplines on the other. The last section provides a summary of the discussion, highlighting the fact that History has been part of the Humanities since antiquity but its linkage with the rest of the humanistic disciplines has seen considerable changes over time.