Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time Podcast.

For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co. UK forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy

the program. Hello in the 6th century AD the Bishop of Tours began his history of the world with the unassailable observation that a great many things keep happening

some of them good some of them bad

Yes, but in writing about the past we're rarely so economical. From ancient epics to medieval hagiographies and modern deconstructions,

historians have endlessly chronicled, surveyed and analysed the great many things that keep happening,

declaring them some of them good and some

of them bad and trying to work out why.

But the writing of history always illuminates two periods, the one history is written about

and the one it's written in. And to look at how the writing of history is written about and the one it's written in.

And to look at how the writing of history has changed is to examine the way successive ages have understood their world.

In short, there's a history to history.

With me to discuss the history of history, our historiography,

our Miri Rubin, professor of medieval and early modern history at Queen Mary,

University of London,

John Burrow, a Maritus of Baylian College, Oxford, and Paul Cartledge,

...