Is Rabelais our contemporary? Intellectual history and critical hermeneutics

How may a historian, who uses texts from the past, take into consideration the fact that such texts are not only historical documents, but are also inscribed in interpretive traditions that remain active and, therefore, available for interpretations that do not rely on historians? This historicity of the specifi c objects of intellectual history has generally been set aside by intellectual history, in the name of a militant insistence on the importance of context. Using the analysis of the classic book by Lucien Febvre on Rabelais, this article shows that a radical contextualism is diffi cult to sustain because it leads to a conception of intellectual history that is abruptly discontinuous and ultimately leads to a form of denial. It may be more useful to take full responsibility for historians' relationships to texts from the past, including genealogical perspectives, as did studies of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. This article argues then for a history of cultural transmission, that takes the form of layered interpretive contexts. This approach fully recognizes the hermeneutic ambivalence of the work of historians and even takes as its object of analysis the understanding of the multiple historicities of these singular objects that are texts. © Copyright 2013 Belin. All rights reserved.