The above example illustrates how important the reader’s linguistic and literary competence is for proper interpretation of textual discourse. This is as true for historical texts as for any other. As Michael Stanford puts it in The Nature of Historical Knowledge,50 “the more we understand how a historian has done the work the better we can penetrate to what that work is about—the world of the past ‘as it really was.’ ” That is to say, the better we pay “some attention to the glass through which