On the current notion of historical fact: between contingency and construction

Abstract

The major methodological changes in history and the social sciences over the last years have prompted new reflections on what a historical fact is and on the relationship among fact, document and the historian’s eye. Such relationship is now acknowledged to be much more complex that assumed until recently, as it is shown in the three trends taken into account in this paper: microhistory, the linguistic turn and post-modernism. Resulting notions on historical fact fluctuate between seeing it as the impredictable effect of contingency and as the construct by the historian.