Abstract These days few people are happy to be called ‘intellectual historians’. Intellectual history has indeed been in the doldrums since the 1960s. It has been charged with all sorts of vices: with ‘internalism’ and ‘intellectualism’, concentrating on theories and doctrines, ignoring social context, social uses and forms of association of the learned; with elitism, concentrating on great authors, great works, great canonical traditions but paying little attention to local traditions, popular culture, and the reception and criticism of works; with ‘purism’, considering the intellectual content of works as something independent of ways of writing and types of persuasion.