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This is a new edition of the well-received Interpretive Social Science (California, 1979), in which Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan predicted the increasing use of an interpretive approach in the social sciences, one that would replace a model based on the natural sciences. In this volume, Rabinow and Sullivan provide a synthetic discussion of the new scholarship in this area and offer twelve essays, eight of them new, embodying the very best work on interpretive approaches to the study of human society.

As a traditional site of historicist practice, medieval studies is particularly well-placed to benefit from the recent reemergence of historicism in literary studies. But this new "critical historicism" is different in both method and interests from past forms of historicist work. The differences are well illustrated by this collection. The concern with politics, the reliance on the materials of economic and social history, the conception of writing as a form of social practice, the focus upon the forces of change in medieval culture, the unwillingness to observe the usual distinction between literary and historical texts, and the historicization of their own practice--these characteristics make the publication of these essays a significant event for medieval studies.