In recent decades, "theory" has achieved substantial market penetration among historians, regarded by some as a lodestar and by others as a devilish influence. Veteran business historians can certainly recall the rapid advance of quantitative methodologies, with their underlying strata of science-based theoretical assumptions, into economic and social history during the 1970s. Ironically, at ro...

Literary history — like the history of any art — involves a special difficulty; it is that of reconciling a general scheme of development and a linear movement in time with the problem of the individual genius who creates new things. That has not been made easier in recent years when New Critics tried to expel the writer from the text, and then Deconstructionists called the very existence of th...

As art museums are digitizing their collections, a crossdisciplinary interaction between image analysts, mathematicians and art historians is emerging, putting to use recent advances made in the field of image processing (in acquisition as well as in analysis). An example of this is the Digital Painting Analysis (DPA) initiative [2], bringing together several research teams from universities an...