ABSTRACT
Some ten years ago, Lynn Hunt, influential spokesman for the ‘cultural turn’ in historical studies, noted that scholars from various fields in the humanities were finding new common ground:
Are we on the verge of a more general cultural studies that will replace the separate compartments of history, literature, art history and the like? Yes and no. Yes, we are all borrowing from each other more and more explicitly. Engravings are no longer just illustrations but also evidence for historical arguments. Police reports, memoirs, conduct books, and autopsy reports are not just historical sources but also models, influences, and sources for ‘literary’ texts. But no, we are not all reading our documents in the same way: historians ask different questions from their colleagues in other fields, and even when they use the same sources, they use them somewhat differently.1
