and vocation depended on their being able to give an account of their exegesis. Cinderella was invited to the ball only in the nineteenth century, when hermeneutics branched out to become the study of human understanding per se. Wilhem Dilthey used the difference between “explaining” and “understanding” something as a means of distinguishing the natural from the human sciences. In the late twentieth century, hermeneutics grew even more ambitious, treating everything from Fords to fashions as “texts.”