History-writing, this seminar suggests, is not the re-creation of a past that is lying mute, waiting for the historian to give it voice. Historiography is instead a code or genre or technology that constructs the past in ways that make it amenable to representation through the code of history. If history-writing is not the truth of the past, and if other forms of relating to it (myth, epic, legend) are erroneous, we can explore the elements that constitute the code of history, prompting us to ask what history-writing is ‘for’, what does it ‘do’.