Abstract
This article is a further response to an attack on conventional historiography by Keith Jenkins, published in Rethinking History in March 2008. An earlier response by Alexander Lyon Macfie defended conventional historiography simply in terms of 'the recovery of meaning from dead text'. I argue that historical enquiry involves a richer methodological 'mix' than this: as well as interpreting their documentary sources, historians explain, compare, and (where appropriate) quantify. In the course of this article, I defend the 'realist' view that the historical past existed independently of our present knowledge and thinking about it, and that facts about it are discoverable in ways analogous to the discovery of facts about the pre-human past by evolutionary scientists. I argue that historical realism is, or should be, consistent with scientific realism, and that in certain specific fields they are coextensive.