ABSTRACT
Historians have an issue with language. Most of the accessible information on what happened in the past is derived from written sources. Source criticism was developed to deal with the language of the past. Despite the importance that language has in forming what we might know of the past, historians have in general been quite reluctant to see this as a specific challenge. Until the so-called linguistic turn left its imprint on the discipline in the 1980s, only a few historians had engaged directly with the challenge presented by language. In 1930, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch introduced a permanent section in their famous journal, Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, on words and things because of the need to direct the attention of historians to ‘the delicate problem of the history and evolution of the semantics of words’ (Febvre 1930, p. 234). Decades later, the German-Israeli historian Richard Kroebner wrote an insightful article on semantics and historiography, which highlighted the role of words for the study of historical consciousness (Kroebner 1953). But it was only in the 1960s and 1970s that the role of language was forcefully recognised in historical studies and particularly in studies focusing on intellectual history. 1 In 1969, Michel Foucault published his Archaeology of knowledge, which presented discourse as a linguistically anchored approach to the study of epistemic changes. The same year, a young Quentin Skinner introduced a new programme for the history of ideas based on how meaning and understanding were formed in constant exchanges of speech acts (Skinner 1988). Foucault and Skinner both dug deep into linguistics in order to privilege the role of language in historical changes.
