Some years ago I was occasionally visited in my office at Victoria College in the University of Toronto by an editor from Wiley‐Blackwell, Tessa Harvey. She lived in Britain and worked out of the Oxford office of John Wiley & Sons but she had relatives in Toronto and consequently took advantage of the family connection to solicit authors and textbook adoptions from the faculty of my university. During these visits we talked of history as a discipline and how it had developed, what forms it took, and how its study could provide the platform for a liberal education and the skills needed in a complex world. Understanding the dynamic of the past and the causes of events are, we agreed, essential elements both in a student’s preparation for life and work and in an educated citizen’s understanding of how the world we live in functions. After several of these conversations, Tessa asked me to write a book on the study of history that would not be an undergraduate or upper‐school textbook in the traditional sense but a consideration of history as a discipline. The idea was to produce a book that would be interesting to an educated lay audience wishing to engage with history as a means of understanding how the past served as a prologue to our own time and as an instrument for appreciating how every generation of historian recasts the evidence. I argued at the time that the study of history was an ideal way to access the perspectives of the past and assess how the present is constantly forcing a re‐evaluation of what we believed happened before we were born. Although I was committed to other projects at the time, I was convinced by Tessa that this would be a worthwhile enterprise and one which would help anyone with even a cursory interest in the past to follow the contours of a notoriously fractious discipline, populated by articulate but frustratingly argumentative practitioners.

My arguments against writing this book were partly driven by the question of whether I was the best historian to attempt it. I have practised the study and teaching of history for over 30 years. I have taught every level of student from newly admitted first years in European surveys to senior graduate seminars. I have supervised doctoral theses in history and I have published a significant bibliography ranging across many aspects of the past from translations and editions to monographs and a great many articles in journals. I have spoken at a long list of academic conferences around the world and I have made educational video series and appeared on television. I am very active as a public speaker on historical subjects to groups ranging from senior alumni to dining clubs; and I lead academic tour groups, as well as teaching in my university’s study abroad programmes in Europe. I have had the honour of being recognized as a fine educator, winning a great many awards for teaching, service, and scholarship. I have held administrative positions that gave me the opportunity to experiment with new means of delivering the university curriculum and establishing what that curriculum should be. My courses are both traditional – including the large, 500‐student introductory survey in European history – and interdisciplinary, having taught on my college’s interdisciplinary programme in Renaissance Studies since its inception.

I am providing this cursus honorum not to establish my credentials for writing this book but to declare that, despite this long and successful career, I am still not certain what history is and what it does; indeed, one of the reasons I agreed to write this book was to help in the process of defining my own discipline and how historians fit into it. In this voyage of discovery, I have been more successful than I thought I might be, inasmuch as I believe that I have at least raised the questions that everyone who confronts the past must address, whether first‐year undergraduates or renowned scholars. The categories, skills, and methods I describe in my book do appear to have worked for me; however, as in any engagement with students of any kind, the sure knowledge that a deep and meaningful understanding of the process of historical writing and research has been transmitted remains uncertain.

The second issue, which I discussed at length with my editors, first Tessa, and after her retirement, Peter Coveney from the Boston office of Wiley, was whether a historian of the European Renaissance could bring sufficient examples and methods from other areas of research and teaching to make the book universally attractive and useful. I confessed that my own work has taken me exclusively into the study of Europe and its culture, even though I have lectured and consulted for universities in China and the Middle East, and even though my own students represent likely the most diverse student body in the world. In my large class, about half of the students were born outside Canada and speak dozens of languages from around the world at home. This, of course, merely reflects the multicultural metropolis that is Toronto; but it also reflects the interest that these diverse students take in studying Europe, particularly those who are recent immigrants or whose origins are very distant from British North America. When I meet with them, my students always say that that they are in my class because they want to understand the culture and institutions of the West, because those are the elements which will necessarily shape their lives in Canada. Even though they admit that confronting certain subjects is challenging to their own traditions, religions, and attitudes, mostly learnt from their families but still very much part of their world‐view, they also affirm the importance of knowing how and why their traditions vary from those in a western, free enterprise, parliamentary democracy. This imposes a serious responsibility on me as a historian and teacher. It is heartening and humbling and requires sensitivity and openness; but it works.

Consequently, my examples in this book are almost all from Europe, from antiquity to the modern world: those are the traditions that have shaped western historical discourse and our use of evidence. And, frankly, these are the examples that I know and understand best. I learnt early from my very diverse students that to try to enter into another culture or tradition without a deep grasp of the complex forces at work within that distant civilization leads to superficial judgments and false analogies, those faux amis that are so glaring when a scholar moves well outside his or her own area of experience. This I honestly learnt from my students: they work hard to avoid such generalizations and shallow narratives, so I must do the same. Furthermore, in the study of history the examples and references matter less than one would expect. Of course, the sources are different and the academic practices of scholarship vary from place to place. But we are, as I note near the end of my book, all disciples of Descartes (René Descartes 1596–1650) in one way or another. Scientific method, empiricism, rigorous, honest research in primary documents, and a deep knowledge of what others have written obtain everywhere, not just in North America and not just in Renaissance European History. Nevertheless, if there are readers who expected a world vision in this book, I apologize because I am not the historian to provide it; there are others better equipped. What I am is an educator and scholar who is faced with a complex interdisciplinary area of research and who has taught students from every small corner of the planet. From them I learnt how to make my work accessible to a broad audience, and to them I am greatly indebted.

History is a particularly complex discipline because it includes almost every aspect of the human condition. It is far from the old political narrative of what happened when; now it follows the contours of our past – actually our several pasts – in such a way that the shared humanity of all of those who have gone before is revealed. I attempt to indicate the importance of this both in my discussion of what kinds of evidence survive and how that evidence should be approached and in my taxonomy of the discipline, dividing my subject into its various subcategories in a manner that might appear almost Linnaean. The purpose of this detailed analysis in the book is to witness and reinforce the wonderful explosion of new historical perspectives that have developed since the Second World War, in some instances during the past few decades. Today, there are so many ways of accessing the experience of our fellow humans in times past that no one scholar or student can ever master them all or even review them all in anything like a comprehensive way. One consequence of this is what many lay readers of history lament: the proliferation of studies that are very sharply focused on a very narrow aspect of the past. The broad sweeps that we associate either with popular history or with some of the great works of earlier scholarship are seldom seen and are even more seldom produced by professional historians. An academic wit once remarked that a professor of history is someone who knows more and more about less and less until he or she knows everything about nothing. This is, of course, a joke; but many see a grain of truth in the observation that academic historical writing appears to have left the general reader behind.

The cause of this results in part from the way in which PhD students in history are trained and their need to produce a substantial publication from the finished thesis to be competitive in a very difficult academic labour market. A broad sweeping study would not easily provide this material. But the current situation also results from our expansion of what constitutes evidence and what we consider to be important. By seeing almost every kind of survival from the past as useful documentation and by desiring a comprehensive picture of moments in the past that shed light on previously obscure spaces, historians are creating pieces of a puzzle which, when put together, reveal a much richer picture of the worlds we have lost. We now know so much more about the lives, attitudes, and circumstances of our ancestors that we should rejoice in this richness, not lament a lost golden age of accessible historical writing. That genre of popular or accessible history is still available and is often extremely well done in several media. I myself have produced video courses and appeared on television to bring an aspect of my own professional interest and knowledge to a general audience. What we see, then, is not a distancing of history from the educated wider population but a much richer choice of books, subjects, media, and interests. To complain that we are losing our sense of collective self‐knowledge by not having a single, clearly formulated national or cultural narrative is to rail against the diversity and complexity of the modern world.

Certain elements in contemporary historical writing can be discordant. Some of these uncomfortable examples result from the movement of history out of the general areas of rhetoric, narrative, and traditional methodologies. We all like stories, and the etymological connections between those stories and history reveals how close they once were. Indeed, in the distant past, there was no distinction: Homer wrote poetry but also provided much of what we know about the Trojan War. Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, c. 69–after 122 AD) wrote gossip about the first 12 Roman emperors in a way that would not be inappropriate for supermarket tabloids; but, again, we have derived much important evidence from his observations. What we demand now, however, is not just a good story in poetry or prose but a fair and engaging assessment of a piece of our history which we can accept as reliable because of the rigorous use of evidence and analysis. The historian remains an important part of this exercise because it is she or he who puts the pieces together and draws conclusions from them. It is still the historian who speaks, not the evidence: in every good historian a bit of Homer and Suetonius lives. Evidence and documentation, as well as the received scholarship on the question, are passive, inert materials that require a historian to assemble them into a critical mass so that some kind of intellectual fission will occur. It is for this reason that I offer a chapter on the historian and privilege him or her over the materials he or she uses.

I do not let the historian off completely, however, from certain charges against the profession. There is never need for jargon or impenetrable language. If an interdisciplinary study of the past employs the language of another discipline, it should be explained and domesticated into plain, clear, effective speech. Levels of diction can remain high, as a memory of the fact that history was once a branch of rhetoric; but a sophisticated vocabulary is not the same as the precious speech of those scholars who want to limit their audiences to those who share their perspectives. This tendency to use jargon really proves Freud’s (Sigismund Freud, 1856–1939) observation about the narcissism of small differences. Language should be welcoming and inclusive, not a barrier to general understanding.

Finally, I would like to affirm my own belief in the efficacy of reading, studying, and writing history. It is an exacting discipline, but one which brings together every aspect of our knowledge and experience. To study history is to study the whole development of entire civilizations, even if only a small part at a time. The complexity of the human condition, the almost numberless forces at work on every society, and the actions that result from either careful or headlong decisions require a subtle and deep appreciation of what it is to be human, living in a community and balancing the public and private good. I tell my students that very few of them will graduate and find work as professional historians; but every one of them will be historians in that their training will give them the skills and knowledge to navigate a demanding and difficult world. To know how others have reacted to crisis or opportunity is to assist in the decisions that every citizen must make for him or herself, in the family, the community, the nation, and the world. To read or hear the news with a deeper understanding, or to cast a vote for a political candidate based on a more profound appreciation of the issues at stake is to validate the study of history. To see others – wherever and whenever they are encountered – as part of a common humanity or as fellow travellers on the shared paths of the human condition is to apply the lessons of history. When the Roman playwright Terence (Publius Terentius Afer, c. 195–c. 159 BC) wrote that ‘I am human, so nothing human should be alien to me’, he was stating the reason we study history, and why were are fortunate that there are now so many aspects to historical study that few elements of our humanity are excluded.

There are many people who contributed to the writing of this book, some actively and others unknowingly. In the former category, I mention and again, with sincere appreciation, Tessa Harvey, whose gentle intensity convinced me to embark on the work, Peter Coveney, who assumed Tessa’s role after her retirement and who has proved an insightful and rigorous reader, and finally Brian Stone who replaced Peter after his retirement. Then, as always, there is my wife, Gillian, my sharpest critic and most trusted editor. In the latter category I include all of my students, from first year to my PhD students, many of whom are now teaching history at other universities across the continent. These outstanding young people have forced me to constantly evaluate and re‐evaluate what I am saying and writing, and their rich diversity has shown me how important the concept of universal human principles and careful judgments are in teaching and research. Finally, my many colleagues in a great many disciplines over a long period of time deserve recognition. We have not always agreed professionally but the disagreements have for the most part been open and respectful discussions about varying interpretations of the past. You have brought so much of your own knowledge and wit to our formal and informal debates about history that I am much the richer for having heard your arguments and read your work.

My sincere hope is that this book will be used by students at every level and by anyone interested in navigating the modern practice of history. It is written to be provocative and as comprehensive as possible, given the limitations of its author. It acknowledges that there are a great many other ways of approaching the reading, writing, and assessing of history; thus any entry into history requires a guide, or in the world of contemporary technology, a GPS. That is what I hope this book offers.