Empathy and History offers a comprehensive and dual account of
empathy's intellectual and educational history. Beginning in an
influential educational movement that implanted the concept in R.G.
Collingwood's re-enactment doctrine, the book goes back to reveal the
fundamental role that empathy played in the foundation of the history
discipline before tracing its reception and development in
twentieth-century hermeneutics and philosophy of history. Attentive to
matters of practice, it illuminates the distinct character of the
historical context that empathetic understanding seeks to capture and
sets out a new approach to empathy as a special variety of historical
questioning.