Term · Method
Historiography
The study of how history is written: its methods, sources, assumptions, and the people who produce it.
Where 'history' refers to the past, historiography examines the accounts we make of it. It asks who wrote a given history, for whom, with which sources, and under what pressures.
For theatre, historiography is especially pressing because the object of study — live performance — vanishes as it happens. Theatre historians therefore work largely from traces: scripts, buildings, images, account books, reviews, and memory.